This, then, is the opening sequence of Ernst Lubitsch's 1937 Angel, a “comedy-drama” as some contemporary reviews referred to it, albeit a genre uncertainty I will want to return to. This was also a film produced at the height of the Production Code's enforced restrictions on Hollywood films. Angel was Lubitsch's first movie since The Merry Widow (Lubitsch, 1934) three years earlier, and the first to be produced entirely under the newly enforced Production Code Administration. But censorship was a condition of creation throughout much of Lubitsch's career.

During his filmmaking years in Germany, censorship existed in a variety of ways, on a local level enforced by the police, then nationally by the military during World War I, banned nationally in 1918 but often continuing on a local level, and, finally, in 1920, with a national board of censorship that reviewed films for release.

So explains the louche, patently expert Lieutenant Niki von Preyn (Maurice Chevalier) to Princess Anna (Miriam Hopkins), who, newly introduced to the exigencies of physical desire, is eager to master the social and sexual codes that are left unreferenced in the carefully curated Royal Encyclopedia that has been her sole guide to the ways of the world. The distance as well as the distinction between a smile and the conspiratorial wink—which signals a determination to act on a (crucially) unvoiced feeling—delineate the artistic as well as social and erotic compass of Ernst Lubitsch's first sound films. That it is Hopkins who ultimately masters the art of the wink attests to her importance in Lubitsch's transition from the gestural language of silent films to the vociferous ideologies, especially in respect to gender, of talking pictures. In three successive, increasingly inventive, morally adventurous films—The Smiling Lieutenant (Lubitsch, 1931), Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch, 1932), and Design for Living (Lubitsch, 1933)—Hopkins channeled and idiosyncratically modernized Lubitsch's Old World sophistication in physically and vocally inflected performances that announced a new comic figure: the woman who winks, we might call this screen avatar of openly desirous, exuberantly modern, morally reckless (even cheerfully larcenous!) womanhood.

Awakenings

There are many beds in the films of Ernst Lubitsch, almost as many beds as there are doors. In the first image of The Wildcat (Die Bergkatze, Lubitsch, 1921), the doors of a military academy open to reveal a wide shot of a man playing a bugle. Immediately following this is another wide shot, this one of soldiers in bunk beds, the beds lined up against a white wall as the men begin to slowly, resentfully rise due to the bugler's noise. The shots that follow briefly alternate between the bugler continuing to play and one soldier hobbling across the room, shutting the window and then returning to his bed. But the soldier's need to sleep is so intense that he does not climb back into the bed. Instead, he miraculously jumps up into it and makes a landing. Sadly, all of this is for nothing as another door opens, this one inside the barracks, as a commanding officer steps into the room barking orders and the men respond by jumping out of bed and running over to their wash stands. The personal needs of the body to remain horizontal must now give way to the needs of the state. The human figure in Lubitsch will be central to what follows here. I wish to explore this by addressing the recurrence of moments centering around the bed, the bed as a nexus of desire, a bringing to life but also of death, a beginning but also an ending.

For a film of this period to have opened by showing humans awakening would hardly have been a singular gesture. Early in the cinema's history, where the physical and emotional states of human figures were tied to the temporal and mobile forms of cinema, such awakenings could serve as a metaphor for the “awakening” of the film itself.

Between the success of The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitch, 1940) and the masterpiece To Be or Not to Be (Lubitsch, 1942), Ernst Lubitsch directed the comedy That Uncertain Feeling (1941), based on a script by Donald Ogden Stewart (The Philadelphia Story [George Cukor, 1940]). While his other works of the period engage in international politics, this film returns to the earlier themes of his marital comedies and explores the failures and flaws of marriage. Lubitsch's take on the popular American screwball of the 1930s was shot “quickly and effortlessly,” as biographer Scott Eyman remarks, between October and December 1940, and released the following April. Lubitsch's first independent production and one of his only films to take place in an American setting, That Uncertain Feeling is a remake of one of the director's earlier silent comedies, the lost film Kiss Me Again (Lubitsch, 1925), which was based on the nineteenth-century French farce “Divorçons!” by Victorien Sardou and Émile de Najac. Whereas Kiss Me Again was highly successful (Lea Jacobs quotes the Variety review on the film that announces that “there is a [Lubitsch] touch that will cause audiences to gasp”), the 1941 version was not as effective, and the critical reception for the film was rather indifferent.

1968 was an important year for the cinema of Ernst Lubitsch. In February, Cahiers du Cinema published a special issue on Lubitsch, which included French translations of existing essays and a filmography, as well as new essays by Francois Truffaut and Jean Domarchi. Later that year saw the publication of Herman G. Weinberg's The Lubitsch Touch: A Critical Study, the earliest book-length work on Lubitsch in English. Then, late in 1968, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held what was at that time a complete retrospective of the director's films. In a review of this retrospective Kirk Bond wrote:

But the expected wave of scholarship on Lubitsch failed to arrive, and, in any event, the critical response to Lubitsch was far from equal to that generated by the films of F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang. Of course, Lubitsch's success and fame are undeniable, even recognized: Lubitsch was commended by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his outstanding contributions to the art of the motion picture. Yet the scholarly investment in his work remained relatively meager. The director whose films exerted an influence on film pioneers such as Buster Keaton and Sergei Eisenstein and was admired by Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, John Ford, Billy Wilder, Jean Renoir, and Truffaut, has received less critical attention than the masters of cinema who acknowledged his work's importance. Lubitsch's American films (1922–1948) remain an under-populated terrain; scholarly engagement with his German work in film (1913–1923) is sparse, his works understudied. The director's place in the history of the Hollywood musical and the romantic comedy also requires elaboration. This holds true as well for the history of early German cinema, where popular cinema has received short shrift.

Sabine Hake, whose Passions and Deceptions remains a wonderfully insightful book on the silent films of Ernst Lubitsch, responded to my query about the print sources she used when analyzing Lubitsch's Three Women (Lubitsch, 1924) by remarking: “so interesting that there is this renewed interest in Lubitsch—not sure why.” Certainly, recent Lubitsch biographers have considered Three Women an unlikely starting point for an investigation that might renew our interest: Joseph McBride's 2018 treatment of Lubitsch characterized the film as “shallow melodramatic fare,” and suggested that Lubitsch may have “lacked a feeling of genuine creative involvement.” In his 2020 examination of the transnational Lubitsch, Rick McCormick dismissed the film in a single paragraph. Admittedly, my decision to pursue this topic is embarrassingly idiosyncratic: This is my third essay on Ernst Lubitsch and his films with Warner Brothers in the mid-1920s. Returning to this group of six films––one of which (Kiss Me Again, 1925) is lost and another of which (The Jazz Singer, Alan Crosland, 1927) was directed by someone else, my attention was drawn to the newly available restoration of Three Women, Lubitsch's second film for Warner Brothers. There was a certain coincidental charm between my “three essays” and Lubitsch's Three Women, but it was also the first of three Lubitsch films to star May McAvoy.

Siegfried Kracauer, the trained architect turned cultural critic, once quipped that popular industrial exhibitions in the early twentieth-century not only disseminated new technologies and notions of progress, but they also seduced the public with “peep-box pictures (Guckkastenbilder)” promising “new worlds.” Some of the worlds German spectators in the Golden Twenties peeped in on at such exhibitions were elaborate film sets with, quite literally, framed interiors and exteriors. In 1922, the director of the Munich Theater Museum Franz Rapp organized a special exhibition on contemporary German set design for the national craft and industry fair. Two halls branching off from the main exhibit were sponsored by major players in the film industry. Here, spectators could gawk at serpentine scene sketches and stills from canonical Expressionist films. Ernst Lubitsch's exuberant epics, period pieces, and parodies Deception (Anna Boleyn, 1920), One Arabian Night (Sumurun, 1920), The Mountain Cat (Die Bergkatze, 1921), and The Loves of Pharaoh (Das Weib des Pharao, 1922) were also richly represented. In particular, the work of the director's principal art designers Kurt Richter and Ernst Stern was prominently displayed—including Richter's 6. by 8 foot miniature model set of the medieval Spanish city of Toledo for his unfinished project Carnival in Toledo, and production shots of the ancient Egyptian city Richter and Stern erected in the sand hills of Berlin-Steglitz for Lubitsch's lavish spectacle, The Loves of Pharaoh.

In 1922, Jean Epstein expressed a preference that, fifty years later, resonated strongly with my own still-inchoate cinephilia: “I want films in which not so much nothing as nothing very much happens.” In his view, a certain strain of cinematic experimentation had left narrative too far behind. Along these same lines, he later growled to fans of such non-narrative films as Ballet Mécanique (Léger, Murphy, et al., 1924) that, if you liked that kind of thing, you should go “buy a kaleidoscope.” But too insistent a narrative distracted from the power of cinema to observe (and magnify)—objects, relations, movements, time. Epstein found it more compelling to keep the spectator in a state of suspension and anticipation. “Drama that acts,” after all, “is already halfresolved and on the way to recovery.”

What was so distinctive about Ernst Lubitsch's early sound era musicals? What made them stand out in their day, and what enabled Lubitsch to be an early pioneer of the genre? Though scholars have described in often brief and general terms Lubitsch's skillful use of a few new early sound tools, we lack an extensive understanding of his early sound methods and the ways in which they reflected or differed from mainstream early sound practices. Focusing mainly on Lubitsch's first two musicals (The Love Parade [1929] and Monte Carlo [1930]), this essay examines how Lubitsch's work compared to typical methods, and considers influences that likely shaped his approach. Whereas the bulk of early film musicals aimed to simulate the experience of watching numbers on a stage, Lubitsch's numbers achieved a complex balance of honoring stage traditions and providing cinema-specific experiences. In The Love Parade, Lubitsch framed his musical numbers as unprecedentedly intimate and private encounters, while in Monte Carlo, he experimented with cinematically manipulating time and space within the numbers themselves. Through his cinema-specific approaches, his balancing of stage and screen methods, and the intimacy he injected into many of his numbers, Lubitsch offered the industry new models for the nascent musical genre that deserve a closer look.

Why Lubitsch was able to take such a distinctly different approach remains more speculative, with factors likely including Lubitsch's established prestige and the director-friendly environment at Paramount, where he worked.

In this essay, I shall explore Ernst Lubitsch's relationship to Jewishness by examining two of his surviving “milieu films.” What do they reveal, and what can they tell us about subsequent developments in his career? “Jewishness” is, of course, a complicated topic, as has recently been demonstrated by the editors of and contributors to the volume Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema. And Lubitsch's relationship to Jewishness was also complicated. “Milieu films,” the German comedies of the 1910s in which he acted (many of which he also directed) were set in the predominantly Jewish milieu of Berlin Konfektion, the garment industry. While these are the most explicitly “Jewish” films of his career, none of the characters in them are ever called Jewish. Nevertheless, contemporary reviews did refer to the characters he played as Jewish, and, in an interview in 1916, Lubitsch made clear that he considered them to be examples of Jewish humor.

Lubitsch's father had come from Russia to Berlin around 1880 and made his fortune in Konfektion. But his father was no poor Jewish peddler from a shtetl in Eastern Europe; he did not speak Yiddish, and he was a successful businessman who raised a family that was solidly upper middle-class—and secular. Although Lubitsch knew a lot about the milieu of Konfektion, it would be wrong to assume any direct autobiographical connection: Lubitsch had worked briefly in his father's business, but he was not interested in such work and was thought to be bad at it.