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Sweet and Sour:
Lubitsch and Wilder in Old Hollywood
I’d like to propose a somewhat different definition of the Lubitsch touch — one that helps to account for why Wilder was able to adopt some of its aspects on his best pictures while other aspects eluded him. It’s a definition that comes in three parts. Part one, as I’ve already suggested, is a specifically Eastern European capacity to represent the cosmopolitan sophistication of continental Europeans to Americans — and with a double edge, as becomes clear in the “American Understood” gag. Lubitsch himself was well aware of the ironies involved in his role as a cultural translator: “I’ve been to Paris, France and I’ve been to Paris, Paramount,” he once famously remarked. “Paris, Paramount is better.” This was arguably one of his few immodest claims, because “Paris, Paramount” was practically his own invention. And he differed from his silent, Viennese predecessor Eric von Stroheim in the way he packaged his expertise for the public. As Stroheim once said, “Lubitsch shows you first the king on his throne, then as he is in his bedroom. I show you the king first in his bedroom so you’ll know what he is when you see him on his throne.”
Part two of the Lubitsch touch wasn’t so much a touch as a kind of guarded embrace. It was actually a vision — a way of regarding his characters that could be described as a critical affection for flawed individuals who operate according to double standards. This probably doesn’t take in Lubitsch’s entire Hollywood oeuvre, but it does seem to apply to all the American comedies mentioned above, as well as such other gems as — sticking only to sound films — The Love Parade (1930), Monte Carlo (1931), The Smiling Lieutenant (1932) and To Be or Not To Be (1942).
Two of the three leading characters in Trouble in Paradise, played by Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins, are jewel thieves in Venice and Paris who double as consummate con artists, plying their trade on each other as well as on other victims, such as an heiress played by Kay Francis. These breezy crooks are romantic hypocrites who can’t be simply condemned or simply applauded, and one might describe the Lubitsch touch here as a rare capacity to view their romantic and hypocritical sides with equal amounts of nuanced attention and moral complexity without succumbing to any sentimentality. Similarly, the very different romantic leads of The Shop Around the Corner — two repressed and lonely clerks employed at a Budapest notions shop, played by James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, who snap at each other at work without realizing that they’re also passionate pen pals who believe they haven’t yet met. By giving so much attention to their cranky peevishness with one another, Lubitsch makes their secret amorous sides even more touching. And the rakish hero played by Don Ameche in Heaven Can Wait is another version of the same kind of duplicity — a man who clearly loves his wife (Gene Tierney) yet periodically cheats on her throughout his life.
The third and simplest part of my own definition of the Lubitsch touch would be a graceful way of handling music as an integral part of a film’s construction. This talent, I would submit, is the one clear way in which Wilder even surpassed his master: In his supreme late masterpieces The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) and Avanti! (1972), it is largely his exquisite use of music — a score by Miklos Rozsa in the first, a collection of Italian pop songs in the second — that makes these movies as memorable as they are.
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Wilder, who also started out as a Paramount director, eventually left the studio after some executives there tried to persuade him to change the German villains in Stalag 17 (1953) — a World War II comedy-drama set in a concentration camp — into Poles, in order not to interfere with the film’s potential German market. (As someone who’d lost much of his family in the Holocaust, Wilder was understandably offended.) The fact that he started out as a journalist may have been the most significant of the differences in background between him and Lubitsch, for it might be argued that one of the strongest aspects of his work is a kind of quasi-documentary realism that places him in a world that’s very different from that of Lubitsch. Think of the documentary aspects of Wilder’s greatest noncomic films, such as Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Ace in the Hole (1951), with their indelible portraits of Los Angeles, Hollywood and New Mexico, and you can already see part of what would make such later comedies as One, Two, Three (1961), Kiss Me Stupid (1964), The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and Avanti! distinctive — namely, their canny uses of locations in Berlin, Nevada, London and Inverness, and southern Italy, conveying a sense of actuality that no studio simulations could approximate.