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Sweet and Sour:
Lubitsch and Wilder in Old Hollywood
By contrast, in Resnais’ relatively big-budget Stavisky... (1974) — which also stars Belmondo (in the title role) and is set in 1933 — there’s a breathtaking piece of mise en scène crafted in and around a palatial resort hotel in Biarritz that actually looks even more opulent and elegant than anything to be found in Lubitsch. It’s all part of a flashback away from Stavisky and his friend Baron Raoul (Charles Boyer) in Paris, narrated by the latter as he describes his recent visit to Biarritz, where he saw Stavisky’s wife, Arlette (Anny Duperet). As the baron in this flashback enters the super-deluxe hotel where Arlette is staying, to the haunting strains of Stephen Sondheim’s first movie score, and takes the elevator, there’s a crane outside the building charting his progress through French windows as he crosses her sumptuous suite, a flurry of crisscrossing maids marking his path, until we see, through the last of the many windows, Arlette getting dressed in her bedroom. Then there’s a startling, very un-Lubitsch-like cut from the baron knocking on her door to a close-up of her swiftly turning her head in response to his knock. It’s a bit like waking from a swank, Lubitschian dream — an apt effect, because back in the present, Stavisky is asking the baron about a nightmare that Arlette had, a seeming premonition of his own downfall.
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Based on these affectionate tributes, one might ask more generally, what exactly did the famous Lubitsch touch consist of? “It was the elegant use of the superjoke,” said Billy Wilder, to the much younger writer-director Cameron Crowe in the interview book they did together (Conversations with Wilder, New York: Knopf, 1999). According to Wilder, it was a kind of extra spin on a comic situation — the sort of thing that once prompted Wilder as a screenwriter to place a sign on the wall of his office saying, “How would Lubitsch do it?” Wilder, a Viennese Jew, used Lubitsch, a Jew born in Berlin, as a major reference point throughout his filmmaking career, and to what degree he succeeded as well as failed in emulating his master is the main issue I’d like to address here. Both filmmakers tended to use little-known European stage farces, often French or Hungarian, as springboards for their own comic inventions, and both had a singular way of juxtaposing European and American customs and styles of behavior as a subtle way of critiquing as well as appreciating both.
Wilder’s best example of what he meant by the Lubitsch touch was a suggestion Lubitsch made during the scripting of Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife: “Gary Cooper goes down the street in Nice, and what he’s looking for is maybe in a shop, a big, big shop like Macy’s. In the store window was information written out, FRENCH SPOKEN ... DUTCH SPOKEN ... ITALIAN SPOKEN ... CZECHOSLOVAKIAN SPOKEN ... and the last one was ENGLISH SPOKEN. The kind of thing you see in Nice. Then underneath that — this was [Lubitsch’s] idea — he added one more line: AMERICAN UNDERSTOOD. That was Lubitsch. [Laughs] We had no joke there before.”
Wilder himself insisted that Lubitsch was inimitable, recalling a famous exchange between himself and fellow director William Wyler when they were both pallbearers at Lubitsch’s funeral in 1947. “No more Lubitsch,” Wilder sadly noted, to which Wyler added, “And worse, no more Lubitsch pictures.”
But for all his admiration of Lubitsch, Wilder was no film historian. He claimed to Crowe that Lubitsch “didn’t do any comedies in Germany, he did great big expensive historical pictures” — an account that omits two of the funniest German comedies ever made, Lubitsch’s Die Puppe (The Doll) and The Oyster Princess, both made in 1919 — and other Lubitsch silents that were “historical” (i.e., costume) pictures but also comedies, such as Romeo and Juliet in the Snow (1920) and The Wildcat (1921). (Incidentally, excellent restorations of both The Oyster Princess and The Wildcat are available on DVD.) Wilder also claimed that after The Marriage Circle in 1924 — Lubitsch’s second Hollywood picture, after Rosita (1923), a comedy set in 1840s Spain — the master stuck exclusively to comedies, which is almost but not quite true: The exception was the underrated and sincere but commercially disastrous antiwar drama with a post-World War I setting, The Man I Killed (1932), also known as Broken Lullaby — which also proved to be Lubitsch’s first collaboration with the man who became his best screenwriter, Samson Raphaelson, who wrote The Jazz Singer and also worked on all three of Lubitsch’s supreme masterpieces: Trouble in Paradise (1932), The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and Heaven Can Wait (1943).