Eclipse Series 8: Lubitsch Musicals

Discuss releases in the Janus Contemporaries, Eclipse, and Essential Art House lines and the films on them.
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Michael Kerpan
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#126 Post by Michael Kerpan » Tue Feb 19, 2008 9:20 am

Haven't yet sat through the youtube Merry Widow -- but I would have to say that the core Lubitsch films for me are Marriage Circle, So This is Paris, Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living -- with honorable mentions for Smiling Lieutenant (sorry, I do like this) and Shop Around the Corner.

Found Heaven Can Wait pretty dismal. Ditto Ninotchka.

How does Student Prince fare -- in comparison to Merry Widow?

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Jeff
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#127 Post by Jeff » Tue Feb 19, 2008 11:09 am

GringoTex wrote:I eagerly await the dvd. Do we know who has the rights?
Warner. At the HTF chat this time last year they said, "Merry Widow is still very much in our plans."
HerrSchreck wrote:There was an awful lot of that sort of comedy floating around back then if you trufflepig for it.
This is my new favorite verb. I'll be using it throughout the day despite the odd looks it will engender. We need to publish The Criterion Forum's HerrSchreck Lexicon (Schrexicon?)

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HerrSchreck
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#128 Post by HerrSchreck » Tue Feb 19, 2008 11:28 am

Heh. I actually learned that while reading an article in the early 90's here in NYC about the state of real estate affairs over in the East Village and then-blossoming Williamsburg. Real estate brokers called artists (or "hipsters") truffle-pigs, because they schnuffled out the great "cool" neighborhoods close to "happening" zones of the city, and always congregated in housing that by default wound up being most desireable for full renovation for stock brokers and investors and other yups who wanted to live in the cool nabes. Wind-up being of course that the artists and original street-urchin hipsters, just like truffle-pigs themselves, wound up not being able to posess that which they had located for the wealthy real estate investors (and wealthy tenants to be), as the buildings were emptied and renovated with rents (or condo/co-op rates) wildly unaffordable to the youth/art/college crowd. Look at the east Village & Soho now-- yuppie heaven. If you see a punk rocker in a purple mohawk sitting in front of a bank panhandling on St MArks Place in a put-on raspy voice, you can be sure it's a new arrival to the city (probably an NYU student with a trust fund) living his version of his pre-stardom strung out NYC life... in a realm that simply doesn't exist anymore. You almost wanta go over to them and muss their hair and go "awwwww, you so cuuuuuuuuute!"

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#129 Post by Jaime_Weinman » Tue Feb 19, 2008 11:57 am

HerrSchreck wrote:If outside of Trouble Lube ever made a film as good as City Streets, Applause, or Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde I'm all ears. These early musicals are wildly hit or miss, compared to Mamoulians unmatched opening blast into the zone beginning w Applause and ending somewheres around his own weakening point at Christina.
Sort of a side note but it's interesting that Lubitsch and Mamoulian often get talked of in opposition, even though apart from the early sound musicals plus both making versions of Ninotchka they don't have much in common (either in terms of projects or career-wise). The early auteurists like Sarris and Bogdanovich used to put Mamoulian down to build Lubitsch up, something I never fully understood even as a Lubitsch partisan. As a director of musicals qua musicals, early Mamoulian surpasses Lubitsch, for the simple reason that he actually had some understanding of songs and how they work in a story. (Something he would later bring to the musical stage when he did Porgy and Bess and Oklahoma!) As Rodgers and Hart found when they worked with Lubitsch on The Merry Widow, he didn't have much tolerance for songs and seemed to be working to turn musicals into straight comedies with as little music as possible.

One thing I would say in defense of Lubitsch is that I do not think his movies work as well on TVs at home as they do in theatres. Well, that's true of any movie, but for some reason the jokes in Lubitsch's films, even these early ones, play much better on the big screen. It may be because the jokes are based on such miniscule things that they're easier to miss unless you're plunked down in the dark and forced to stare up at a large screen; I don't know. But for example my favorite sequence in The Love Parade, the silent sequence of Jeanette MacDonald reading a list of Chevalier's conquests, seems to work better when it bounces off the audience reaction to each change of mood. Of course that in itself is a cinematic skill -- the ability to play off the reactions of an audience that doesn't exist when the film is made or edited -- so maybe these movies are more cinematic than I'm giving them credit for.

Also I think Heaven Can Wait may be the acid test for how much you can take Lubitsch (I have to admit I never heard "Lube" until this board). Since it's almost two hours of arch Lubitschian jokes with almost no plot, it may be the one that only hard-core fans can get through. (Sort of like hard-core Hawks buffs love Hatari!)

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justeleblanc
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#130 Post by justeleblanc » Tue Feb 19, 2008 12:49 pm

JW, I see what you mean about how Lubitsch treats music and songs in his musicals, but I think you may be taking too much of a leap when you say that his atypical treatment of song is ignorance toward the form. If anything, my appreciation toward these films comes from how Lubitsch plays with the form a bit, even in terms of balance (cutting out many of the songs). But I guess there was no normative film musical practice at the time, and even Pabst ran into similar criticisms.

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HerrSchreck
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#131 Post by HerrSchreck » Tue Feb 19, 2008 1:59 pm

Jaime_Weinman wrote:Sort of a side note but it's interesting that Lubitsch and Mamoulian often get talked of in opposition, even though apart from the early sound musicals ... they don't have much in common.

As a director of musicals qua musicals, early Mamoulian surpasses Lubitsch, for the simple reason that he actually had some understanding of songs and how they work in a story.
Well I think you've answered your own question right there. The comparisons are inevitable owing to the both of them working musical numbers into the text in 1929 producing simultaneous pieces of entertainment which were roadmaps for the future genre which became known as the musical. They were contemporaries working side by side at the dawn of the sound revolution, and for that reason alone comparisons are justified: during any period of stark invention and rapid change, competing directors, actors, and studios will always be studied and compared. And when a brand new genre is launched-- especially one as flexible and beloved, and unique, as the musical-- it's inevitable to compare its' basic inventors. (Not to mention the fact that after stating that you don't understand the urge towards comparison, you go right ahead and do so!)... Lubitsch with The Love Parade (his first sound pic), and Mamoulian with Applause (his first film incidentally, post his earlier work on the stage), both dating from 1929. I've heard it stated that Applause is the most astounding cinematic debut that side of Kane, and I'm willing to go it further-- it may well be the most incredible cinematic debut, period.

Let me clarify what I find so superior in Mamoulian: first off I agree hugely with a point you make in Mam's understanding the function and place of songs within the text. People hesitate to call Applause a full fledged musical owing to the fact that there are only a few full blown vaudevillian numbers performed on the stage. But look at how cleverly, subtly, and in a manner so deeply felt Mam sneaks his musical numbers into the text, and in a fashion so natural that the fact that a musical number has just been performed has blown right by you... Helen Morgan going thru her steamer trunk gazing at pics of Hitch singing "What I wouldn't do for that man"; or ending one of the most moving mother-daughter conversations between Morgan & Peers by singing her to sleep with a lullaby; or the Ave Maria with little April at the convent. In his very first venture into cinema, Mamoulian already understands the demands cinematic mise en scene (and, in that specific case, melodrama) well enough to avoid the forgiving artifice of the stage, where the audience can be directly addressed, action can stop, and a musical number can be crudely broken into, lights can go down and up, performers can be seens jogging offstage at the number's end, etc. His musical numbers function so naturally as part of the action-- Morgans songs are part of her vocation, her home life, her love for her man, her daughter, etc, that the crudity of the stage is completely removed. (And yet-- still-- a couple years later w Love Me, the wildest self reflexivity is introduced with flapping horndog humor, with Stop The Action And Sing musical numbers flicking appropriately on and off like a wacky lightswitch in a manner entirely in tune with the material). This is a man entirely and naturally and immediately in tune with all the different garden varieties of great cinema, working in mediums far beyond the range and emotional complexity/depth of Lubitsch.

But for me, even more than the handling of the musical numbers, in examining the strongest films of Mamoulian-- and I admit something happened there as the mid-thirties were hit that either sapped his talent or whatever, it's one of the more depressing falls from greatness... his success with the Zoro-type technicolor swashbucklers notwithstanding-- there is a far greater breadth of ability and genius. A power of not only feeling, raw artistic power, but a monstrous blows-me-over sense of visual invention, a sense that with each film he's made the greatest film ever made. Mamoulian had a huge depth, eye and ear for tenderness and melancholia, and sense of Serious Street Badass, of The Human Monster that eluded Lubitsch. I'll leave out the humor zone as they both competed on equal terms for a time in that zone... (although in terms of genuinely vicious black humor, evident in Applause, City Streets, Love Me and especially Jekyll Hyde, Mamoulian operated comfortably in a zone completely alien to Lube).

In terms of simple depth, there was a degree of meaning and introspection-- the sublime-- past which Lubitsch feels distinctly uncomfortable to me. I find myself returning to most Lubitsch rarely for the simple fact that for me his films rarely mean more than they show on their surface. What is happening onscreen is what they're about, plain and simple. The purest of lite comedy melodrama, and entirely inocuous. Can be fun as hell, but for me repetitions too close back to back-- and this includes the sublime masterpieces like Trouble In-- lead to boredom and quick turnoffs.

There is an art to invisible style, and though I wouldn't claim Lubitsch's style was entirely invisible, in terms of mise en scene, it's far less impressive to me than-- to use Dave Hare's phrase-- the bulk of the "pantheon" directors. Lubitsch never seemed very interested in exploring the possibilities afforded by cinema; his greatest delight resided in the human element onscreen and by rote in the audience by giving everyone a good jolt of spieling humor mixed with tingle of the risque. It's almost as though his cinema was an entirely social act devoid of introspection... like the hilariously funny class clown addicted to bowling you over and spieling constantly.. relying on his ability and feeding off of the sense of fun, and rise he gets out of the rise others get out of him. And while there's certainly nothing wrong with this, he rarely ventured beyond these safe bounds, at least in terms of working with the boundless textures and surfaces afforded by cinema... especially considering the great carte blanche he enjoyed there for awhile.

So I'd say, in terms of how much the "direction" plays into the sum of the effect, the delight of a Lubitch film is every bit as much about the Raphelson script, the savoire faire of Herbert Marshall, the sparkle of the jewels and the glimmer of the cocktail dresses tight on a nice ass-- the achievement, in his truly memorable works, is spread around. Like the sound era extension ofHarold Lloyd sitting around a table with his gag men, working up a film, only in this case it's Lubitsch, Raphelson, et al. The experience of the films are like being at a really great party with well-heeled good looking guests who are natural aristocrats yet are awesome company as they constantly take the piss out of themselves and tell great jokes on top of it all, while drinking great bubbly, smoking fine havana churchills, etc.

On the other hand the delight of Mamoulian 1929- 1935 is all that, plus the dark side of the human race, plus a willingness to get you to meditate on this without planting ideas in your head for you-- but over and above all the astonishing invention, the incredible tour de force of the mise en scene and virtuoso visual style... all the wit and sex and effervescence with these added bonuses of full-spectrum emotional connectivity, is a director who is totally infatuated with the power of the cinema, and never content to rest on a "proven style".

Incidentally the name "Lube", if I remember correctly, was a kind of teasing nickname for his namesake member on this board, who-- though pretty much totally paletable nowadays-- came on the board trying to tear everyone a new asshole from day one. Those days are long behind us and member "Lubitsch" but wa-la! the nickname somehow thwacked onto the Man Himself.

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#132 Post by Jaime_Weinman » Tue Feb 19, 2008 2:46 pm

HerrSchreck wrote:I admit something happened there as the mid-thirties were hit that either sapped his talent or whatever, it's one of the more depressing falls from greatness...
Mamoulian still had it; he just didn't get to show it in movies very often. His stage musicals basically changed the theatre forever: first Porgy and Bess (1935, based on his own nonmusical production of Porgy) and then Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel (1945), where he probably did even more than Rodgers and Hammerstein to completely overhaul the idea of what a musical could be and how emotionally involving it could be. His direction of those shows apparently had many of the same qualities you find in his early movie musicals. Unfortunately his movies from the same period were either work-for-hire projects where he wasn't fully engaged, like Silk Stockings, or just didn't have good enough material. But I wonder whether he might have returned to form if he'd made films of Oklahoma! or Carousel. (He was hired to do the Porgy and Bess film but, as with many projects, got fired early in the shooting.)
Lubitsch never seemed very interested in exploring the possibilities afforded by cinema; his greatest delight resided in the human element onscreen and by rote in the audience by giving everyone a good jolt of spieling humor mixed with tingle of the risque.
I'm not honestly sure I agree with that. Or at the very least I think exploring "the human element onscreen" is mise-en-scene in itself. Lubitsch was one of those directors who was mostly obsessed with human behavior within the shot and as you probably know, he had a tendency to coach actors in every movement and inflection (with the result that no matter which stars he's working with they all have similar tics of movement, line delivery, timing). But none of these movements, inflections and other mannerisms are really ones that would work on a stage. They're cinematic gestures made by actors.

The lack of depth you find in his films is a complaint a lot of people have, and a legitimate one; even Lubitsch seemed to feel that some of his movies lacked feeling and Raphaelson (who, let's remember, specialized in dramatic/sentimental writing on his own, like The Jazz Singer) definitely felt dissatisfied with some of the mechanical aspects of their movies. If I don't agree it's because I think the thematic content of some of these movies -- played out in the form of running gags, objects and references that Lubitsch always wanted built into the script (like his famous insistence that the change of character in Ninotchka had to be a payoff from some object seen earlier in the film, like the fashionable hat) -- give a certain weight to his best films. What grabbed me about The Smiling Lieutenant was the way the whole film played on and developed the theme of the intersection of music and sex, and varied that idea in all kinds of different and ingenious ways right from the opening bugle fanfare.

American comedies have never been particularly noted for thematic discipline, in my opinion; they tend to be kind of loosely structured and move from one set piece to another. And that's great -- and there is a limitation to the tight structure and control-freaky direction of Lubitsch's movies that they don't give full freedom to performers or to spontaneous comedy moments. But there is something special to me about how his best movies have the discipline to really develop a theme or a point of view until, by the end, you feel like there was more to this story than the characters themselves may have fully understood. Love Me Tonight is a better musical than The Smiling Lieutenant, and in many respects a better movie, but it doesn't give me the same feeling that it was about something more than just the surface story.

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#133 Post by GringoTex » Tue Feb 19, 2008 3:04 pm

I agree with you, Shreck, that Applause is a great film, but I also think it's Mamoulian's only one. It was obviously his most personal film, drawn from his own experiences on the stage, and this gives it a dramatic authenticity. And then, of course, Mamoulian was a talented man of many great ideas, most of which he brought out in Applause. But I don't think he was a great director, because when he ran out of ideas, he couldn't make good films anymore. He was a conceptual artist but not a very good craftsman. You can start to see this in Love Me Tonight where he stumbles between the fantastic set pieces. And then by Queen Christina, where he has to treat a story that's entirely not his, he's embarrassingly bad.

I agree with you that Lubitsch never filmed (or even tried to) the "Human Monster." His greatness lies in his formal qualities: the way he could edit on a dime, bring out the tiniest details and evoke the slightest of emotions in medium shots, create musical numbers without the music from the internal rhythmn of his sequences (such as the 76 instances of characters opening and closing doors, windows and curtains in The Love Parade).

That reminds me of a supposed exchange between Lubitsch and Hawks:

"Howard, how can you make two or three reels about a man shooting a gun?"

"I don't know, Ernst. How can you make two or three reels about a man walking through doors?"

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#134 Post by Adam » Tue Feb 19, 2008 7:18 pm

GringoTex wrote: And then, of course, Mamoulian was a talented man of many great ideas, most of which he brought out in Applause.
I just saw City Streets at UCLA, and that's pretty good - maybe not great, but quite enjoyable.

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#135 Post by tryavna » Tue Feb 19, 2008 8:40 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:How does Student Prince fare -- in comparison to Merry Widow?
Michael, I'm a huge fan of Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, but I don't think it makes for a very apt comparison with Merry Widow. As a silent, Student Prince works primarily as a light romantic comedy -- further reinforcing Jaime's assertion that Lubitsch viewed musicals primarily as comedies. But without musical numbers of any sort, I wouldn't suggest going in to a viewing of Student Prince with Merry Widow as your frame of reference. It's also not particularly risque, but I'd say it's closest parallel would be something like Design for Living.

The fact of the matter, however, is that Student Prince is really an amalgam of Lubitsch and MGM. Apparently, Irving Thalberg ordered some reshoots after he was unsatisfied with some of Lubitsch's more eliptical touches -- though he may very well have just wanted to show off Norma Shearer to better effect (they were married just after the film was released). If you like Ramon Novarro and Norma Shearer, however, it's extremely enjoyable, and it's an instance where the usual MGM gloss helps propel the story (as in some of Cukor's work) rather than serves as a distraction.

By the way, I agree entirely with the idea that Heaven Can Wait is a good litmus test for just how far one is willing to go with Lubitsch. I happen to like it, just as I happen to like Hatari for that matter.

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#136 Post by domino harvey » Tue Feb 19, 2008 11:20 pm

Time for me to say Heaven Can Wait is my favorite again. I do like Hatari! though not the best out of all of Hawks-like it

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#137 Post by HerrSchreck » Wed Feb 20, 2008 4:42 pm

Adam wrote:
GringoTex wrote: And then, of course, Mamoulian was a talented man of many great ideas, most of which he brought out in Applause.
I just saw City Streets at UCLA, and that's pretty good - maybe not great, but quite enjoyable.
I absolutely adore City Streets. I think, like Jekyll & Hyde and Applause, it's a truly excellent film. It's strengths to me lie not only in the idea that this is a man whose preceding pictures bore absolutely no similarity to it, not only in the extreme richness of the black humor and cynicism (and huge sense of street cool and authenticity), but in the depth of sincerity in the melodrama between Cooper and Sydney. Mamoulian took the gangster form that Warner - Vita were pounding away at with Little Caesar & Public Enemy and created something far more cinematic and genuine. To this day I can't watch Sydney's performance, her rendering of her characters journey towards a kind of redemption-- and Coopers reverse arc-- without getting misty (and it's not just because this gal was so damned gorgeous with one of the best bodies in Hollywood). The richness of the moods, the stunning montage, the wonderful moving camera, the street jive... to me it just doesn't get any better than City Streets.

This films admirers will multiply geometric-like once someone takes this thing outa rights limbo and releases it. It's a precode Paramount, so my guess is it's in Universals' fucking hamper (or rice bin).

And Gringo, I agree with you on Queen Christina. Starting with that film, for some reason, it's all over for Mam's run of "pantheon" level greatness. I saw that film on a double bill at the NYC Thalia w Sternbergs Empress (can you imagine the contrast?) expecting greatness, and was delivered a dog. What a big pile of Nothing.

Nothing bugs me more (just for starters, in terms of whats wrong w Queen C) than films like this one, or Streisand's Yentl, or Czinner's As You Like It, when some well-beloved public darling actress at a high point decides she's going to play the role of a man, yet is so vain that she wont allow herself to be seen with no makeup, so the end result is utterly highvoiced, pretty, and completely absurd and unbelieveable. The whole thing is, truly embarassing.

Can't remember the name of the flick right now, but a noble exception from the classic era is a K Hepburn film where she ripped every stitch of makeup off her face, dressed and acted VERY close to a dude.

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#138 Post by Morgan Creek » Wed Feb 20, 2008 4:56 pm

HerrSchreck wrote:Can't remember the name of the flick right now, but a noble exception from the classic era is a K Hepburn film where she ripped every stitch of makeup off her face, dressed and acted VERY close to a dude.
That'd be Sylvia Scarlett, in which Hepburn seems to be uncannily channeling Bowie.

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#139 Post by Via_Chicago » Wed Feb 20, 2008 5:10 pm

Morgan Creek wrote:
HerrSchreck wrote:Can't remember the name of the flick right now, but a noble exception from the classic era is a K Hepburn film where she ripped every stitch of makeup off her face, dressed and acted VERY close to a dude.
That'd be Sylvia Scarlett, in which Hepburn seems to be uncannily channeling Bowie.
Off the topic of Lubitsch now, but Sylvia Scarlett is without a doubt my favorite Cukor. It's fucking awesome.

Carry on.

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HerrSchreck
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#140 Post by HerrSchreck » Wed Feb 20, 2008 5:14 pm

Morgan Creek wrote:
HerrSchreck wrote:Can't remember the name of the flick right now, but a noble exception from the classic era is a K Hepburn film where she ripped every stitch of makeup off her face, dressed and acted VERY close to a dude.
That'd be Sylvia Scarlett, in which Hepburn seems to be uncannily channeling Bowie.
Bingo, and BINGO. I remember thinking the Bowie angle when I saw it (my girlfriend owns the 100th BDay Hepburn box in which this is contained).

Hep's deep voice, greater overall commitment to "serious acting", created a far more believable result than the above mentioned pics.

Anyhoo, back to Lubitsch!

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#141 Post by Adam » Wed Feb 20, 2008 6:51 pm

HerrSchreck wrote:This films admirers will multiply geometric-like once someone takes this thing outa rights limbo and releases it. It's a precode Paramount, so my guess is it's in Universals' fucking hamper (or rice bin).
Definitely Universal. It was opening night of a Universal Pre-Code series at UCLA that is still going on, so you can check out the details on the UCLA Film & TV Archive website.

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#142 Post by HerrSchreck » Thu Feb 21, 2008 12:02 am

I disagree on most fundamental points here. I feel that the formal consistency that you honor is a hiding place from which Lubitsch almost never strayed, and that this consistency rarely shows sparkle, innovation, or depth as a "director", and thus the end result is not very highly cinematic to me, personally.

Auteurism for a man like Lubitsch to me is problemmatic when assigning it a quality of honor. In reality he shows a style that worked for him, and repeats it... with very few true resounding masterpieces of the type we're talking here. If Mamoulian says "here's what's been done with this genre, now I'll take the expressive limits of these just a bit further and show you how clever I am"... then Lubitsch says "here's what I've done with this genre, I-- with this studio gumming my thumbs & licking my boots and giving my everything and everything-- will now take this no further and show you just how narrow my idea of cinema is."

And I don't agree with the assessment of Mamoulian-- most of the genres he toyed with, starting with 1929's Applause, were either nonexistent at the time or in their absolute infancy; and what he did with them (in my opinion, of course) is not take them just a bit further, but turn them into absolutely sublime cinema. Real, eternal high art cinema with depth and well assembled breadth. And such wildly divergent projects, which are astonishingly different from the "genres" that were just then being established... this may make Mam the person-- the auteur-- more difficult to track or pin down within the text (though certainly the deft deeply felt montage, the wonderfully moving camera, the sense of the avant garde and the wonderful use of multiple narrative surfaces assigning unscripted values to progressing elements within his melodramatic arc and symbol order, identify a clear style running thru), I think this is a plus, something to be hugely admired, meeting the challenge of crafting masterpieces out of wildly divergent projects assigned. Kind of an avant garde, self-reflexive John Ford. It's just a shame that he clashed so severely with the bosses in the mid 30's. When he got back into the swing he was handed technicolor grot.

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#143 Post by domino harvey » Thu Feb 21, 2008 1:23 am

I just realized I never chimed in with thoughts on One Hour With You. I thought the song about wedding rings at the beginning was one of the best in the set, maybe the dirtiest song of all. Adolph and the Professor looked so much alike that I occasionally got confused. The abundance of audience interaction in this one got a little weary by the end. Still, funnier than the Smiling Lieutenant.

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#144 Post by HerrSchreck » Thu Feb 21, 2008 1:54 am

It's all good, brother. I try to flag my comments that might piss people off (and those that wouldnt, though one never knows) with the disclaimer "this is only my opinion". Same as you.

The true history of cinema is too large for any one mind or textbook to carry around with any potential for meaningful exposition or digestion.. thus there are a thousand and one different histories of cinema, with each person having their own shining stars. I know you have your own very eclectic (at least as eclectic as my own, but with a probably morebroader-sweep sense of appreciation of a wider field of films) tastes in cinema.

Re Lubitsch in particular, I'm of two minds when it comes to his style and career: whenever someone complains about an artist, any artist, that their last work is similar to their penultimate (or earlier) work, it perplexes me. If a person is highly original, develops their own style which echoes the noise that the inside of their brain is making when all is quiet... that's about the best one can hope for. An artist staying true to their inner voice.

Film is a bit different, than say a popular music artist who is writing his own material-- particularly in the golden era. Few experienced the freedom Lubitsch had. So, before describing the converse nature of my "other mind" I'd say

to be honest, I can take or leave Love Me Tonight-- it cracked me up, but I've watched it once and never returned to it. The same way I never return to most Lubitsch. Comedy/drama is one thing, but lite comedy tends to be fun at first or second view until all the jokes are memorized or anticipated. If there's nothing left, and the style is invisible and devoid of depper substance, there's just nothing left. In my life I came very late to Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, Lubitsch to a degree, etc. Even more sophisticated material like the best of Sturges may get an annual view at most. The movies that strike me the heaviest are the movies that, well strike me the heaviest. I don't find Lubitsch anywhere near as funny as, say Jean Vigo, and he doesn't have any of the meaning, the substance, the wonderful eternal poetry for me to see him as a Grand Master the way others do. And his truly captial G Great Comedies are too few and far between for me to see his consistency as something worth a huge salute. It may well be a black mark against him. In the past when just starting to sing I had a tendency to avoid moments of direct intimacy with my voice-- I'd slip into a "cool" or streety phrasing. An old drummer friend kept pointing out how I'd keep scooping with my phrasing, and indicated those rare moments where I allowed myself to open up and how much they worked and got to him. It was a revelation, and I broke the protective shield and my work became more complete.

Which takes me to my other mind about following the inner voice. On one hand Lubitsch is true to his inner voice... but his vocabulary was small. Very small. And he never really sought to expand it, or at least find a way to do so in a way that meant anything beyond the surprising moment of poignancy during a melancholic goodbye during the close of a ribald drawing room comedy. Considering the length of his career, and the great carte blanche granted to him, and the millieu from which he hatched, I think his formal qualities are pretty rudiementary given the fact that they seemed to progress hardly at all. Even John Ford, another anti-avant enemy of the self-reflexive, whose style was very difficult to pin down or detect, showed an ambition in his films and a recognition of the vast vocabulary and means of punctuation, all the glorious surfaces, etc, available to him. So while Lubitsch can be great fun and a hoot-- don't get me wrong-- in terms of cinema I walk away with very little more than a good time.

And on many terms that's good enough. As it should be. But when laid against the incisive sincerity and overhwelming originality of Applause, City Streets, and Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde-- and, for many I guess, Love Me Tonight-- and their maker during those years, for me there's just no comparison. Mamoulian, brand new to the cinema, from the getgo showed he could hang perfectly comfortably in Lubitsch's zone of operation. Whereas the vocabulary of the first three above are completely out of the depth range of Lubitsch. The rich vocabulary with the camera and the cutting knife, the complexity, black sophistication of humor, the sublime poetry, street sense were as alien to the hurdy gurdy nature of Lube as roller skates to a crippled giraffe.

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#145 Post by Jaime_Weinman » Thu Feb 21, 2008 12:16 pm

HerrSchreck wrote:Comedy/drama is one thing, but lite comedy tends to be fun at first or second view until all the jokes are memorized or anticipated. If there's nothing left, and the style is invisible and devoid of depper substance, there's just nothing left.
I don't think comedy is inherently less substantial than drama, though I suspect that this is pretty commonly believed now even among directors who claim to love comedy. (There used to be many celebrated directors who would proudly make straightforward romantic comedies with happy endings, and get acclaimed for it. Now that kind of comedy is mostly made by hacks and the good directors make kinda-sorta comedies with kinda-sorta happy endings. Though the good, solid, substantial comedy may be starting to make a comeback of sorts.) That's a matter of personal taste, of course.

But I will say that I don't really agree with your statement that Lubitsch was never willing to stretch himself. Of course after the mid-'20s he primarily worked within the romantic-comedy genre with its built-in rules (except for The Man I Killed which not only sucks, but suggests to me what John L. Sullivan's Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? might have been like). But within that genre, he was constantly trying different things and themes, maybe more so than most comedy directors. It's not like after succeeding with Ninotchka (not one of his better movies anyway) he kept on returning to that well; The Shop Around the Corner is an exploration of the workplace life, To Be Or Not to Be is a very different type of political comedy from Ninotchka and Heaven Can Wait is a strange attempt to do a plotless story of a man whose life was of no apparent worth at all.

Whether you like those individual movies or not, there's a different reason for doing each one and a different idea they're exploring, which was probably more important to Lubitsch than the camera setups. (Again, we're talking about the odd case of a director whose style shows more distinctively in the actors' performances than in the way they're photographed.) And since most Lubitsch comedies are based on a theme that runs through most of the scenes and jokes (the intersection of music and sex in Smiling Lieutenant, theft and crime in Trouble in Paradise, workplace experience in Shop, politics-as-theatre in To Be), I think that gives them greater weight and substance than you give them credit for.
davidhare wrote:Mamoulian is someone to me without any distinct directorial personality. He's a more than competent, and sometimes brilliant metteur en scene but his projects always seem to say to me "here's what's been done with this genre, now I'll take the expressive limits of these just a bit further and show you how clever I am" - thus Love me Tonight borrowing from Clair to an American context and milieu, but showing nothing like, for instance the central integration Clair makes of the boulevardier tradition with "realism" and with the integration of song into the narrative.
What I think Love Me Tonight has over the other early musicals is the way Mamoulian managed to combine his own directorial personality with truly great songs. Clair and Lubitsch and other early musical directors did not usually work with songs of the quality and substance of Rodgers and Hart's, but used songs that would not distract from the action. (Even if Lubitsch was given a hit song like "Beyond the Blue Horizon" he'd cut it down to only a minute and a half. He was not about to let the songwriters take over the movie.) By working closely with Rodgers and Hart, Mamoulian was able to insert long, substantial musical sequences where the songs are the centre of attention -- when you have a song as good as "Isn't It Romantic?" it's hard for anything else to be the focus -- yet the storytelling, camerawork, etc. don't just stop for the song. That's a genuine milestone, I think, especially because Mamoulian would carry these lessons with him to Broadway and revolutionize the stage musical, and in turn these things trickled back into Hollywood. When you see a "golden age" musical where the best scenes are perfect fusions of staging and songwriting, instead of the song just supporting the staging or vice-versa, you're seeing the legacy of Mamoulian.

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HerrSchreck
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#146 Post by HerrSchreck » Sat Feb 23, 2008 4:15 am

Jaime I wouldn't take exception to anything you've said except for
Whether you like those individual movies or not, there's a different reason for doing each one and a different idea they're exploring, which was probably more important to Lubitsch than the camera setups. (Again, we're talking about the odd case of a director whose style shows more distinctively in the actors' performances than in the way they're photographed.) And since most Lubitsch comedies are based on a theme that runs through most of the scenes and jokes (the intersection of music and sex in Smiling Lieutenant, theft and crime in Trouble in Paradise, workplace experience in Shop, politics-as-theatre in To Be), I think that gives them greater weight and substance than you give them credit for.
I DO give them credit, as I said. On their own terms they are absolutely positively good enough: well thought out comedy melodramas which absorb you fully and completely (the good ones anyhoo) and send you out in a good mood. You have a good time. And in certain terms there's nothing more to ask of a nights entertainment.

What I said is that the achievement pales for me only when compared to the near (short term, at least) revolution of Mamoulian in from Applause to Love Me/Jekyll/City Streets. There are wavering degrees of credit attributed to various projects, which will tweak according to emotional response.

To me the kind of comedy that murders me is the comedy of Zero De Conduit, L'Atalante, Chaplin's City Lights, Loyds Safety Last or Haunted Spooks, Keaton's The General. Mystery of the Leaping Fish. I return to Plan Nine From Outer Space almost bimonthly. I give the very best of Lubitsch maybe an annual go round.

In the the cave of my Taste Register, my simple saying that "this stuff is not Fanaticalville for me" doesn't mean I don't think there's no excellence there.

All based on tastes of course.

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colinr0380
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#147 Post by colinr0380 » Tue Feb 26, 2008 1:29 pm


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whaleallright
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#148 Post by whaleallright » Tue Feb 26, 2008 10:12 pm

(Again, we're talking about the odd case of a director whose style shows more distinctively in the actors' performances than in the way they're photographed.)
A false opposition, I think. Much of the "Lubitsch touch" resides in the way he coordinates his actors' gestures and his cutting style -- with great precision. I would say the art direction and overall mise en scène associated with Lubitsch is distinctive as well (the high ceilings and overall play with extremes of size, the aggressive use of backlighting) but plainly not as distinctive as, say, Sternberg.

Another major component of the "Lubitsch touch" is the playful narration (narration in the narratological sense, not the VO sense) -- an overt game of chance and expectation played with the audience, emblematized in the shatterings of the fourth wall in, say, THE LOVE PARADE.

Of course yet another element is the continental insouciance and sexual frankness.

Any others to add?

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HerrSchreck
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#149 Post by HerrSchreck » Wed Feb 27, 2008 9:31 pm

jonah.77 wrote:
(Again, we're talking about the odd case of a director whose style shows more distinctively in the actors' performances than in the way they're photographed.)
A false opposition, I think. Much of the "Lubitsch touch" resides in the way he coordinates his actors' gestures and his cutting style -- with great precision. I would say the art direction and overall mise en scène associated with Lubitsch is distinctive as well (the high ceilings and overall play with extremes of size, the aggressive use of backlighting) but plainly not as distinctive as, say, Sternberg.

Another major component of the "Lubitsch touch" is the playful narration (narration in the narratological sense, not the VO sense) -- an overt game of chance and expectation played with the audience, emblematized in the shatterings of the fourth wall in, say, THE LOVE PARADE.

Of course yet another element is the continental insouciance and sexual frankness.

Any others to add?
I think there's a bit of over-attribution here based on love. Tight cutting in and of itself isn't really a "directorial style", neither are continental insouciance or sexual frankness. Tight (not necc "rapid") cutting is a requirement for any kind of a "finished" feeling film of value, and can exist within any number of directorial styles, like "good photography" or "good acting". The latter are cinematic styles or genres, which any number of directors have approached with a huge variance of personal style. These are the zones in ascript which one begins with, before one even sets down to think about deploying cast or crew in whatever positions are chosen. I'd go so far as saying Lubitsch's whole topical obsession with the drawing room and the upper bourgoisie is not only NOT a directorial style, but may have actually prevented him from branching out into zones that could have upped the number of truly memorable films the man produced after the mid-30's (and perhaps forced him into deeper contact with himself, maybe get down with something a little but more personally meaningful, but it never really happened.)

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GringoTex
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#150 Post by GringoTex » Thu Feb 28, 2008 11:25 am

HerrSchreck wrote:I think there's a bit of over-attribution here based on love. Tight cutting in and of itself isn't really a "directorial style", neither are continental insouciance or sexual frankness. Tight (not necc "rapid") cutting is a requirement for any kind of a "finished" feeling film of value, and can exist within any number of directorial styles, like "good photography" or "good acting".
This is all true in regard to the idea of tight cutting in general, but Lubitsch's tight cutting is specific- hence, a style. His tight cutting means he never allows his characters to think or ponder on a situation, to reflect on moral positions, or to assess their surroundings. And he loves the ellipse. It's very similar to Hawks, but whereas Hawks' characters are too busy doing something for the luxury of self-reflection, Lubitsch's characters are too busy doing nothing. (this is why I consider Hawks and Lubitsch the most atheist of filmmakers- it never occurs to them to even ponder the existence of a higher being).

Again, I want to point out that as tight as Lubitcsh cuts, he always makes room for a character to enter a room and to leave it. His is a style of transience.

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