The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (256 page)

If any individual altered the shape of her career, it was director W. S. Van Dyke. Having used her in
Penthouse
(33) and
The Prizefighter and the Lady
(33), he persuaded MGM to put her opposite William Powell in
Manhattan Melodrama
(34). Next came the first of the screen portraits of Dashiell Hammett’s private eye and wife:
The Thin Man
(34, Van Dyke), which made her a big star.

For the next seven years she hardly faltered:
Stamboul Quest
(34, Wood);
Evelyn Prentice
(34, Howard);
Broadway Bill
(34, Frank Capra);
Wings in the Dark
(35, James Flood);
Wife vs. Secretary
(36, Brown);
The Great Ziegfeld
(36, Robert Z. Leonard);
To Mary—With Love
(36, John Cromwell);
Libeled Lady
(36, Jack Conway);
After the Thin Man
(36, Van Dyke); as Kitty O’Shea in
Parnell
(37, John M. Stahl);
Double Wedding
(37, Richard Thorpe);
Test Pilot
(38, Fleming);
Too Hot to Handle
(38, Conway);
The Rains Came
(39, Brown);
Another Thin Man
(39, Van Dyke);
I Love You Again
(40, Van Dyke);
Love Crazy
(41, Conway); and
Shadow of the Thin Man
(41, Van Dyke).

During the war, she worked for the Red Cross and made only one film:
The Thin Man Goes Home
(44, Thorpe). She no longer had as strong an interest in movies, but she was very good as the wife in Wyler’s
The Best Years of Our Lives
(46).

She was too competent ever to seem less than in charge, but her material now was seldom stimulating. Very few of all her films are outstanding, but in the 1930s she was close to the mainstream and thus flourished. After the war, she never regained that position and mixed government work with movies:
The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer
(47, Irving Reis);
Song of the Thin Man
(47, Edward Buzzell);
Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House
(48, H. C. Potter);
The Red Pony
(49, Milestone);
That Dangerous Age
(50, Gregory Ratoff);
Cheaper by the Dozen
(50, Walter Lang);
Belles On Their Toes
(52, Henry Levin);
The Ambassador’s Daughter
(56, Norman Krasna);
Lonelyhearts
(58, Vincent Donehue);
From the Terrace
(60, Mark Robson);
Midnight Lace
(60, David Miller); Stuart Rosenberg’s
The April Fools
(69);
Airport 1975
(74, Jack Smight);
The End
(78, Burt Reynolds); as the secretary in
Just Tell Me What You Want
(80, Sidney Lumet); and with Henry Fonda in
Summer Solstice
(83, Ralph Rosen-bloom).

She got an honorary Oscar in 1990.

Ernst Lubitsch
(1892–1947), b. Berlin
1914:
Blinde Kuh; Fraulein Seifenschaum; Meyer als Soldat
. 1915:
Auf Eis Geführt; Zucker und Zimt
. 1916:
Als Ich Tot War; Der Gemischte Frauenchor; Der Erst Patient; Der G.M.B.H. Tenor; Leutnant auf Befehl; Schuhpalast Pinkus; Der Schwarze Moritz; Wo Ist Mein Schatz?
. 1917:
Der Blusenkönig; Ein Fideles Gefängnis; Der Kraftmeyer; Ossis Tagebuch; Prinz Sami; Der Letzte Anzug; Wenn Vier Dasselbe Tun
. 1918:
Die Augen der Mumie Ma; Carmen; Der Fall Rosentopf; Fuhrmann Henschel; Das Madel vom Ballet; Meine Frau, die Filmschauspielerin; Der Rodelkavalier
. 1919:
Die Austernprinzessin; Ich Nochte Kein Mann Sein; Der Lustige Ehemann; Madame Dubarry; Meyer aus Berlin; Die Puppe; Rausch; Schwabenmadle
. 1920:
Anna Boleyn; Kohlhiesels Tochter; Medea; Romeo und Julia im Schnee; Sumurun; Die Tolle Rikscha
. 1921:
Die Bergkatze; Vendetta; Das Weib des Pharao
. 1922:
Die Flamme
. 1923:
Rosita
. 1924:
The Marriage Circle; Three Women; Forbidden Paradise
. 1925:
Kiss Me Again; Lady Windermere’s Fan
. 1926:
So This Is Paris
. 1927:
The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg
. 1928:
The Patriot; Eternal Love
. 1929:
The Love Parade
. 1930: an episode from
Paramount on Parade; Monte Carlo
. 1931:
The Smiling Lieutenant
. 1932:
The Man I Killed; One Hour With You
(credited to and planned by Lubitsch, but directed by George Cukor);
Trouble in Paradise;
“The Clerk,” episode from
If I Had a Million
. 1933:
Design for Living
. 1934:
The Merry Widow
. 1937:
Angel
. 1938:
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife
. 1939:
Ninotchka
. 1940:
The Shop Around the Corner
. 1941:
That Uncertain Feeling
. 1942:
To Be or Not to Be
. 1943:
Heaven Can Wait
. 1946:
Cluny Brown
. 1948:
That Lady in Ermine
(completed after Lubitsch’s death by Otto Preminger).

As Hollywood recedes, Lubitsch’s role as a creative entrepreneur and as the germ of European sophistication becomes more fascinating. Considering the way he was rebuffed by Mary Pickford on his first American film,
Rosita
, and so wittily mocked for his Teutonic stubbornness, it is remarkable that he achieved such eminence in Hollywood and that his reputation rested on the supposed delicacy of “touch.”

It seems to me still questionable whether that touch was a matter of cinematic fluency. Or did Lubitsch possess a fine sense of a special kind of performing wit, the daring with which one character in a stage farce briefly shares his ironic superiority with the audience? Lotte Eisner has described the Lubitsch of the German period as the epitome of the servant to whom no man is a hero. And there is something of a droll Figaro who abets his master’s adultery, hurrying on his trousers to avoid exposure, boldly winking at the audience as he does so. The effect is enchanting and flattering, for it makes the audience feel worldly. But the trick has a clear artistic limit: it puts the servant in a smug position from which he is never likely to be caught out himself. In other words, is Lubitsch’s touch restricted to the cynical commentary on a comedy of manners? The tragic feeling that Ophuls or Renoir bring to the same form rarely darkens Lubitsch’s consciousness.

Of course, Lubitsch had himself been an actor. From 1911 to 1918, he was a member of Max Reinhardt’s company, and from 1913 onward he acted in films, usually playing comic old men. Until 1917 he acted in many of his own films, but after the war he developed the German historical romance with great success. He had a vivid if theatrical sense of composition and grouping, an equal mastery of large crowds and star players, and a clever if rather obvious way of inventing mundane, intimate business for noble characters—again, this is the servant’s knowledge that a Casanova has piles. As humor it was more sly than penetrating, but even in his German films Lubitsch had a way of understating his ploys so that they flattered perception. His most notable historical pictures were
Madame Dubarry (Passion
in America),
Anna Boleyn
, and
Sumurun
, in which he played the part of a dwarf—a typically grotesque and inventive performance. Pola Negri and Emil Jannings added to their fame with appearances in Lubitsch’s films.

He went to America in 1923, when the country and Hollywood were still hostile to foreign talent. As Lotte Eisner has said, in America Lubitsch’s style refined itself, abandoning slapstick for “nonchalance.” He worked for Warners, and in
The Marriage Circle
he made a model of sophisticated comedy for the silent era. He then went to Paramount for
Forbidden Paradise
, from a play by Lajos Biro. Starring Pola Negri and Adolphe Menjou, it transposed a continental and aristocratic setting to the American studios and introduced the idea of the comic underpinnings to pompous dignity. He stayed at Warners for
Lady Windermere’s Fan
and directed Myrna Loy in
So This Is Paris
. By now his success was overcoming xenophobia.
The Student Prince
, made at MGM with Ramon Novarro and Norma Shearer, was a huge boxoffice hit. Apart from
Eternal Love
, made for United Artists, he was at Paramount from
The Patriot
to
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife
.

In time, he became director of production at that studio, with results that von Sternberg described and suffered from: “[he] held himself responsible for the work of other directors. This, of course, helps to impair a man’s eyesight.” In Sternberg’s case, Lubitsch harried him the more for alleged extravagance in making
The Scarlet Empress;
in fact, Sternberg had only used spare footage from
The Patriot
, so evidently shot at silent speed it is incredible that Lubitsch did not realize what had happened. But there was something of a feud between the two men, perhaps because Sternberg had exactly the gravity beneath bitterness that Lubitsch scared off the more resolutely he tried to lay hands on it. As Sternberg said, “When Lubitsch was serious, not trying to indulge in little drolleries, he could make something unbelievably bad, like
The Man I Killed.”
And terrible that film is, just as
Ninotchka
and
Heaven Can Wait
are a good deal less funny than reputation would have us believe. Lubitsch’s sound comedies vary enormously.
The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, The Smiling Lieutenant
, and
The Merry Widow
are smart, gay, and urbane, but is it possible for a great comedy to star Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald?
Design for Living
and
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife
are stagy, ill-cast, and formal, but wonderfully inventive for all that. The best films Lubitsch made in America are the truly amoral
Trouble in Paradise
, in which the cynicism is so indulged that it becomes energetic and liberating;
Angel
, which could be Lubitsch’s tribute to Sternberg and Dietrich;
The Shop Around the Corner
, which recreates Budapest in America and inhabits it with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan in a beguiling romantic comedy of pretence and cross purposes; and a film unto itself,
To Be or Not to Be
.

That film, made during the war, transcends cynicism and, for the only time, allowed Lubitsch to see the actor as a representative of humanity. “Touch” really means something here because we are made to laugh while in sight of outrageous situations. Tact is central to the style and is the tangible proof of a sane mind observing the dangerous farce. It is his funniest film because it is the most serious. American cinema has still hardly digested such startlingly brutal comedy; the model for that style is Buñuel, which reflects on the caution in so much of Lubitsch’s work as in the films of Billy Wilder, Lubitsch’s heir.

Only persistent viewing can test the theory that Lubitsch does not have too strong a visual imagination. His talent was always theatrical, literary, and to do with performance. Cukor has told how far Lubitsch worked out everything in advance, and the rigidity that came from that. And if the achievement is more modest than some claim, it may be because the quality of measured performance stemmed so much from Lubitsch and from the reputation he had in his own lifetime.

That sort of sophistication cannot be copied; it is either shared with actors or it seems contrived. Carole Lombard and Jack Benny seem in charge of
To Be or Not to Be
, while in, say,
Design for Living
, Gary Cooper, Fredric March, and Miriam Hopkins look awed by some monstrous ham behind the camera. Just as Chaplin has sometimes frozen good players with his unmanageable exhibitionism, so, according to Clarence Brown, “[Lubitsch] used to show them how to do everything, right down to the minutest detail. He would take a cape, and show the star how to put it on. He supplied all the little movements. He was magnificent because he knew his art better than anybody. But his actors followed his performance. They had no chance to give one of their own.”

The Shop Around the Corner
may be as sweet and light as an Esterhazy honey ball—whatever that is—but it is also among the greatest of films. Nor do its actors feel dominated or made to imitate anything. This is a love story about a couple too much in love with love to fall tidily into each other’s arms. Though it all works out finally, a mystery is left, plus the fear of how easily good people can miss their chances. Beautifully written (by Lubitsch’s favorite writer, Samson Raphaelson),
Shop Around the Corner
is a treasury of hopes and anxieties based in the desperate faces of Stewart and Sullavan. It is a comedy so good it frightens us for them. The café conversation may be the best meeting in American film. The shot of Sullavan’s gloved hand, and then her ruined face, searching an empty mail box for a letter is one of the most fragile moments in film. For an instant, the ravishing Sullavan looks old and ill, touched by loss.

George Lucas
, b. Modesto, California, 1944
1971:
THX 1138
. 1973:
American Graffiti
. 1977:
Star Wars
. 1999:
Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace
. 2002:
Episode II, Attack of the Clones
. 2005:
Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Star Wars
was the beginning of one of the great American movie empires. From up in Marin County, George Lucas has presided over a series of films derived from
Star Wars
as well as the Indiana Jones pictures. He has made a vast fortune, yet he remains one of the saddest of moguls. He stopped directing; his marriage to editor Marcia Lucas broke up; and not even Lucas seems entirely confident about what he has wrought. For there can be no doubt that he was the example to a generation of filmmakers who worked with creatures, comic books, machines, and special effects. At this time, it is rumored that Lucas’s research into effects could yet produce computer-generated imagery permitting new movies from the collected work of dead actors. And maybe one day the computers will make the films in a sterile atmosphere, unsullied by human intrusion. All too often his actors seem dead.