Film Forum

“How would Lubitsch have done it?” asked a sign above Billy Wilder’s door. Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) was the first of the great European directors to establish himself in Hollywood and by far the most influential. Having made hit ribald comedies and triumphant spectacles in his native Germany, Lubitsch revolutionized American movies with a sui generis subtlety, style, visual wit, and sophisticated innuendo—“The Lubitsch Touch” (as definitive a trademark as Master of Suspense would be for Hitchcock)—inventing the modern movie musical and romantic comedy in the process.

In the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, he was, with Cecil B. DeMille, the most famous director in Hollywood (in Preston Sturges’ SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS, Veronica Lake is desperate for a screen test with Lubitsch) and, such was his prestige, the only one to retain full artistic control throughout his career. Years after Lubitsch’s death, Wilder (an up-close observer as a two time scenarist for The Master) remarked, “For years we all tried to find the secret of The Lubitsch Touch. If we were lucky, we’d sometimes make a film like Lubitsch. Like Lubitsch, not real Lubitsch.”

Presented with generous support from the Robert Jolin Osborne Fund for American Classic Cinema of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s

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Reviews

“[The Lubitsch Touch] was a kind of lost art, like Chinese glass-blowing.” 
– Billy Wilder

“One of the enduring glories of the American cinema.” 
– Dave Kehr

“Ernst Lubitsch serves medicinal bitters in the champagne flutes of this terse, elliptical, comedy-tinged yet pain-seared romance…”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“The prodigious ellipses in his plots work only because our laughter bridges the scenes. In the Lubitsch Swiss cheese, each hole winks… What cannot be learned or bought is the charm and mischievousness, ah, the mischievous charm of Lubitsch, which truly made him a prince... If you said to me, ‘I have just seen a Lubitsch in which there was one needless shot,’ I’d call you a liar. His cinema is the opposite of the vague, the imprecise, the unformulated, the incommunicable. There’s not a single shot just for decoration; nothing is included just because it looks good. From beginning to end, we are involved only in what is essential.”
– François Truffaut

“[Lubitsch] remained almost single-mindedly committed to producing wry, light, sparkling comedies that reflected the values of graciousness and grace.”
– Nick Pinkerton, ARTFORUM

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