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I finished Joseph McBride’s major new film book How Did Lubitsch Do It? a few days back, and needed some time to think about what I’d read. Really good books about directors don’t come along very often, and of the newer breed this one joins Bernard Eisenschitz’s book on Nicholas Ray, Foster Hirsch’s on Otto Preminger and Alan Rode’s recent study of Michael Curtiz as a fascinating, illuminating read.

McBride has written some of the closest studies of John Ford, who he was able to interview; the great Ernst Lubitsch passed far earlier in 1947, yet left his mark as one of the most influential directors in Hollywood history. McBride digs into the producer-director’s roots in Germany, when he worked with Max Reinhardt on the Berlin stage. Lubitsch transplanted his talent to America early in the 1920s and was thus firmly established before the arrival of waves of refugees from the Hitler regime. Interestingly, although his special gift was comedy, Lubitsch’s extravagant epics caught the attention of Hollywood, which was always on the prowl to snap up ‘artistic’ European directors. He worked for stars like Pickford and moved between several studios, gaining a reputation for bedroom farces pitched at a higher level of wit than those from homegrown directors like Cecil B. DeMille.

Author McBride never lets go of his prime mission, which is to try to isolate, explain and define what was meant by ‘the Lubitsch Touch.’ Even in silent films, Lubitsch consistently invented comic situations loaded with innuendo and irony, that illuminated visual jokes that seemed to spring from the characters, as opposed to being imposed on them by a gag writer. Often slyly suggestive, a perfect Lubitsch Touch construction was understated, sometimes ironic but seldom cynical. A ‘shared understanding’ generated by direct author-viewer communication, a Lubitsch effect expressed his love for things European, elegant and sentimental.

McBride finds The Touch in German films made during WW1 and several key silent comedies in Hollywood. The style really came together when sound was added. Toying with the possibilities of the musical format, Lubitsch confected affectionate, playful & naughty romantic comedies with Maurice Chevalier. The big Lubitsch films are given a serious going-over, examined from multiple angles using a wealth of research. McBride adds his own interpretations to trends in the director’s work, praising some pictures to the skies (Trouble in Paradise) and surprisingly, not others (Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife). The analysis of Trouble in Paradise convinces us that it may be the most sophisticated picture ever made. The show suggests all manner of sexual excess without once making anything overt, yet was shelved as wholly unacceptable when the Production Code was enforced.

McBride’s focused assessment of Ernst Lubitsch’s contribution is compared to that of Rouben Mamoulian, who is found wanting when he imitated Lubitsch’s style. The hothouse exercises in style and glamour of Paramount’s hot director Josef von Sternberg were not to Lubitsch’s taste. Sternberg’s career took a nosedive when Lubitsch became the Paramount production chief for a couple of years, but we are assured that Lubitsch did not have it in for his fellow director. When he gets his directing career going again, Lubitsch intersects with more writers (Walter Reisch, Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder) and continues to develop his signature style. Unlike some directors Lubitsch was a friend and true collaborator with his writers, challenging them to perfect their jokes into constructions that paid off in extra, even funnier jokes. Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, To Be Or Not To Be and Heaven Can Wait are all originals with few repeated elements, by turns satirical, sentimental, politically savage and sweetly fantastic.

Although some of us tend to relate to Ernst Lubitsch through his most vocal, loyal acolyte Billy Wilder, McBride uses Wilder mainly to help zero in on the concept of The Lubitsch Touch. Wilder often returned to film subjects that seemed to be direct attempts to recapture Lubitsch’s elegant perfection of form; and often adapting the work of some of the same European playwrights Lubitsch favored. The book’s title is derived from a motto Wilder kept on his office wall, an oath-reminder to remember the Master.

Joseph McBride’s holistic approach doesn’t try to sort Lubitsch into biographical and thematic pigeonholes, which makes the read an intense experience for film adepts that want their analysis thoughtful, straight and deep. McBride doesn’t button up a topic and move on, but instead keeps angles of study afloat in an ongoing discussion. A particular film title will bounce back scores of times when some scene or event becomes relevant again. Some readers may confuse this with repetition, but it begins to pay off when we think we’re gaining purchase on an understanding of what the elusive Lubitsch touch might be. Billy Wilder never claimed that his hommages to his mentor ever quite equalled the Master’s work. I think McBride gets as close as anybody to an understanding of Lubitsch’s twinkle-eyed genius.

Yes, the McBride How Did Lubitsch Do It? is a heavyweight item. Grab it when you have some solid reading time, and prepare some bookmark placeholders to allow a return to the good parts.

(How Did Lubitsch Do It? Columbia University Press, June 26 2018, 576 pages)

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

Just a note today from correspondent Bill Dodd, after screenings of The WAC’s Billy Budd brought back memories of renaissance talent Peter Ustinov. July 14, 2018:

Glenn — one of the less desirable things about getting older is the feeling that one may be repeating one’s self. If I’ve already waxed poetic about Billy Budd back when the DVD came out, please forgive me and disregard this.

I have no idea if that’s true or not, but I can tell you that’s what he said. And he gave a 22 year-old broadcaster an unforgettable day. I managed to write a letter to him about a month before he died to thank him for that day. I hope he got it. — Bill Dodd, Retired Broadcaster and movie freak.

I told my own ‘meeting Peter Ustinov’ story in a footnote to my 2010 review of his film Hot Millions.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

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Some odd announcements! Severin has just announced a Blu-ray of Del Tenney’s amazing, spectacular, guaranteed-to-have-sprocket-holes fright film The Horror of Party Beach. I’m sure that’s all that need be said to set off a tsunami of disc sales. Actually, it’s fun, especially the wince-inducing songs.

On the other hand, I immediately leaped to order a BFI disc of Kevin Brownlow’s It Happened Here, the stealth classic about the nature of Fascism. It’s a Savant favorite and one of the first that I reviewed for the old website, eighteen years ago. The audio on that Image DVD was so shaky that I needed to watch the movie with a continuity transcript from MGM. The new disc has subtitles!

Kino Lorber is talking about a new licensing deal with Universal, so we’ll be interested in seeing what becomes of that. Quite a few Universal winners of the ‘forties have come out on Region B discs, but I’m told that the obvious film noir titles are not part of the arrangement. It’s likely half a year off, anyway.

The new Noir City e-magazine is out, from the Film Noir Foundation, and the item being touted the loudest is an Eddie Muller interview with author James Ellroy. The full info on this, and some contests being run this month, is on the Film Noir Foundation’s main page. The cover re-thinks the cast of Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential with actors from the classic noir period. Instead of Kim Basinger playing a hooker who has ‘been cut’ to better resemble star Veronica Lake, they just substitute Veronica Lake. How does that work?

Voice Switches: In case my recent reviews left the wrong impression, some correspondents have offered corrections to information about who dubbed what, in two movies. Reader Andrew Leblanc wrote director Rüdiger Suchsland, who said that actor Udo Kier only narrated the English-language version of Hitler’s Hollywood. But Suchsland hasn’t yet said who voiced the German-language track.

And correspondent Phil Smoot assured me that, on the subject of the 1960 Village of the Damned, actor Martin Stephens didn’t dub his own voice. Perhaps Stephens told me that he dubbed himself for The Innocents the next year and I confused the films. Smoot is convinced that David Zellaby’s voice in Damned is a familiar woman voiceover artist who specializes in children’s voices, one he’s heard in countless English pictures.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

Correspondent Edward Sullivan got snooping for web references to actress Marie Devereaux, the famed Hammer star we’ll be seeing later this month in Indicator’s expected Blu-ray of The Stranglers of Bombay. He first ran into her mention in the diaries of one Edward Jay Epstein, who explains that back in the early 1960s, he filmed a couple-days’ worth of battle scenes in Greece for a never-finished version of The Iliad, that apparently should not have gotten very far, but went forward because the investors and the Greeks thought Marlon Brando was signed up and on the way. It’s a good story; he names a lot of names, and even bad-mouths director Rudolph Maté, calling him a hack.

On his ‘ten years later’ page Epstein mentions that in one of his attempts to salvage the project, The Iliad was to be told from the POV of the Cassandra character — and Marie Devereaux was planned to play Cassandra. At that time she was apparently known as a stand-in for Elizabeth Taylor in the epic Mankiewicz picture Cleopatra, and may be seen in some of the long shots.

Maybe everybody knows about Devereaux and Cleopatra except me. Ed followed up, finding found these images on the IMDB that prove that Devereaux was indeed ‘standing in’ with Richard Burton and others … in full costume. Thanks, Ed !

Miss Devereux is still very much around — this is her facebook page.

New Kino discs just arrived. Billy Wilder’s Irma La Douce is reportedly his most popular picture, what with its bright color and co-stars Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon. David Selznick’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is prime ’30s Technicolor, and has a famous cave rescue scene (topical, huh?) designed by William Cameron Menzies. Also here and worth snooping into are the curious-looking Republic thriller A Strange Adventure, and some kind of crime picture I have never heard of called Tiger by the Tail, the poster of which touts, ‘…and Introducing CHARO.’

Finally, I’m heading straight for Kino’s release of a classic noir that’s been M.I.A. for ages, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster in I Walk Alone. It’s directed by Byron Haskin.

And, courtesy of Joe Dante, here’s a link to the actual real estate page for the famed Frank Lloyd Wright Ennis House. Yes, you too can purchase The House on Haunted Hill; all that’s required is a paltry $23 million dollars, the price of a single Trump trip to play golf. I see the Ennis house every two days or so — I shop at an Albertson’s supermarket just below the hill. I took this fuzzy picture a couple of years ago (gotta get a telephoto lens, I guess). In case the sticker price seems high, they say it comes furnished!

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson