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Sweet and Sour:
Lubitsch and Wilder in Old Hollywood
If he had a comic theme of his own that made him more cynical than Lubitsch — even at times a sour misanthrope — this might be described as the double standard that drives his characters into elaborate and often tortured deceptions. The classic example would be Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon as jazz musicians on the run from Prohibition gangsters who wind up in drag, playing in an all-girl band at a plush resort hotel, in Some Like it Hot (1959), Wilder’s most popular comedy. But one can also cite The Seven Year Itch (1955), Love in the Afternoon, One, Two, Three, Kiss Me Stupid and The Fortune Cookie (1966), among many other examples.
Both Lubitsch and Wilder had reputations for being “naughty” as comic directors. But it’s worth noting that in some ways the topics of capitalism and class are even more taboo as topics of discussion in American culture than sex, and from this standpoint, part of the naughtiness of both directors had to do with their treatment of these topics, especially from the perspectives of their respective eras. There are few Thirties comedies that have a more morally complex view of capitalism than Trouble in Paradise, and few comedies of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies that expose the potential ugliness of capitalism more directly than Ace in the Hole, Sabrina (1954), The Apartment (1960), One, Two, Three, Kiss Me, Stupid, The Fortune Cookie and Avanti! (In Lubitsch’s films, by contrast, in keeping with Thirties fantasies about wealth, we most often get royalty and military pomp instead of capitalism — which is in part why Maurice Chevalier wound up as his standby actor, much as Jack Lemmon would subsequently become Wilder’s favorite actor.)
In keeping with this topic, Wilder is often drawn to characters whose strongest suit is a certain vulgar vitality: Think of Kirk Douglas’ ruthless journalist in Ace in the Hole, or James Cagney’s Pepsi Cola executive in One, Two, Three. In this respect he is quite unlike Lubitsch, who ridicules both actors and Nazis in To Be or Not To Be for their vanity and childishness but would never dream of celebrating anyone’s coarseness the way Wilder would. And on the matter of sex, one should note that male homosexuality and crossdressing crop up repeatedly in Wilder’s work as comic standbys, but they hardly appear at all in Lubitsch’s. Think of how much comic mileage is wrested out of men dressed as women in Stalag 17 or Some Like it Hot, or out of suggestions of gay behavior in the opening sequences of both The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and Avanti!.
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Was Lubitsch really inimitable? I bring this matter up because there are some characteristic “Lubitsch pictures” that he oversaw as Paramount’s production chief that were mainly or exclusively directed by other people, such as Love Me Tonight (1932, directed by Rouben Mamoulian), One Hour with You (1932, co-directed by George Cukor) and Desire (1936, directed by Frank Borzage). A few critics even plausibly maintain that Love Me Tonight — starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, the romantic leads in Lubitsch’s The Love Parade, The Smiling Lieutenant and The Merry Widow (1934) — is superior to the musicals Lubitsch directed.
On the other hand, one could argue that Wilder’s greatest applications of the Lubitsch touch are those that get beyond the master’s surface tics and in some ways might even be said to beat the master at his own game in sympathetically critiquing his characters while satirizing certain national traits. (Interestingly enough, this never happened during his excursions to Paris. In Love in the Afternoon, the clichéd observations about the city, like those about the French in general, feel like second-hand derivations from Lubitsch, while the French caricatures in the blowsy Irma la Douce are strident as well as phony.) For me, Wilder’s most profound treatment of Europeans occur in two of his late masterworks, made back to back, both of which tanked at the box office — The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and Avanti!, movies which register as definitive statements about English repression and Italian sensuality (in addition to Italian bureaucracy in the latter movie). In the case of Holmes, it’s the whole Victorian era, including Queen Victoria herself, that’s submitted to Wilder’s critical scrutiny, and the sensuality of a continental heroine played by Geneviève Page figures centrally in throwing the hero’s inhibitions into relief. In both films, working with his favorite and perhaps best collaborator, co-writer I.A.L. Diamond, Wilder uses material derived from others (characters in the former, a play in the latter) to create a story that is highly personal.
It’s a pity that Wilder himself didn’t value these films more. In his interview book with Crowe, he confesses that he essentially abandoned The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes after it had an unsuccessful preview, allowing it to be extensively cut by others, and he’s mainly disparaging about Avanti!, in part because of what might be regarded as one of its greatest strengths: “It smelled that it was shot in Italy,” he complained — as if a studio-created Italy would have been better, matching Lubitsch’s own preference for Paris, Paramount over Paris, France. But the journalist in Wilder turns out to be a lot more relevant than the more celebrated confectioner, and in some respects the filmmaker’s images, which are usually overlooked, are allowed to supersede his words: Both films essentially begin with pungent sequences without dialogue that bring us back to the expressiveness of silent cinema. (Avanti! is also exceptional in Wilder’s work for its profanity and nudity — not to mention the degree to which it actually qualifies as an Italian film because of the number of Italians who worked on it, and the amount of unsubtitled Italian dialogue it employs, without ever allowing viewers who don’t understand the language to lose the narrative thread.)
Both films have rather inhibited heroes — the brilliant but withdrawn and emotionally armored Holmes (Robert Stephens) in the first, a brash but inexperienced and prudish American businessman from Baltimore named Wendell Armbruster Jr. (Jack Lemmon) in the second — with consequences that are, respectively, tragic and comic. Holmes, the ultimate sophisticate and cosmopolitan, turns out to be an extremely vulnerable innocent when it comes to women and affairs of the heart, periodically driving him back into the solace of his cocaine addiction. And even though there are no American characters in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, I think it could be argued that Dr. Watson (Colin Blakely) as Holmes’ incredulous comic foil functions here in the same way that an American character among Europeans would in a Lubitsch movie. (He’s the supposedly commonsensical character whom Holmes periodically has to explain the plot to when it’s actually us, the Yankee rubes, who have to be clued in.)