Ernst Lubitsch

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Here’s the trailer from Ernst Lubitsch’s long lost silent film The Patriot, which is the only film nominated for a Best Picture Oscar that is now lost. Emil Jannings, Florence Vidor, and Lewis Stone star.

The trailer is fairly tantalizing, I mean who wouldn’t want to hear Jannings’ “Agonized Roar”, and the fact that it’s a Lubitsch film makes it doubly so. But sadly this is all we have left of the film save for some crowd footage that ended up in Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress. Here’s hoping someday this one turns up.Read More »

Ernst Lubitsch’s So This is Paris stars Monte Blue and Patsy Ruth Miller as a doctor and his wife. The couple is as faithful as the day is long–but when a dance team comprised of Lilyan Tashman and Andre Beranger make the scene, the days grow mighty short. Blue, Miller, Tashman and Berander spend the lion’s share of the film hiding their various peccadilloes from each other. The beauty of the Lubitsch touch is that, while So This is Paris suggests much, there isn’t a single censurable image throughout. Based on a play by Henry Meillac and Ludovic Halevy, this was a favorite of audiences and critics alike.Read More »

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A charismatic lieutenant newly assigned to a remote fort is captured by a group of mountain bandits, thus setting in motion a madcap farce that is Lubitsch at his most unrestrained.Read More »

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The tragic story of Don Jose, a Spanish cavalryman, who falls under the spell of a gypsy girl, Carmen, who treats him with both love and contempt and leads him into temptation and thus damnation.Read More »

Translated from German wikipedia wrote:
The film was shot in the UFA-Union-Filmstudios, Berlin-Tempelhof. The sets were designed by Kurt Richter. Although the National Film Archive also has designs by Paul Leni for the film, his involvement cannot be confirmed due to rediscovered film credits. The same applies to Ossi Oswalda’s involvement as an actor, as stated by Hermann G. Weinberg in 1977.
The 1,163-meter-long film was examined by the censors in July 1918. The premiere of the film, which was announced in the Lichtbild-Bühne as Der Fall Rosenblum,[4] was on September 20, 1918 at the U.T. Friedrichstraße in Berlin.Read More »

Sally Pinkus is an German-Jewish boy who takes a job as a shoe store clerk after being expelled from school for goofing around. Soon fired for trying to court the owner’s daughter, Pinkus lands another job in a more ‘upmarket’ shoe salon, only to be fired again, before charming a rich benefactress to fund his ultimate dream: Pinkus’ Shoe Palace.Read More »

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In 1919, before Ernst Lubitsch was known for his famous “touch,” the master director made something like nine films–a perfect opportunity for an artist to really practice his craft. Even he had to start somewhere.

Madame du Barry was retitled Passion to avoid the anti-German sentiment after World War I. Even though it was a French title and a French story, in Europe the movie was connected to the German director Ernst Lubitsch. Lubitsch’s name appeared nowhere in the American posters or movie titles so the movie wouldn’t bomb in America.Read More »

But ohhhh! that Mitzi!

A delightful comedy of manners from Ernst Lubitsch (with some assistance from George Cukor), rivaling Love Me Tonight as the best musical comedy and Trouble in Paradise as Lubitsch’s supreme achievement of that year. While most critics agree that it just misses reaching either one of those heights, it’s still one of the supreme treats of the Pre-Code era, best enjoyed a little over an hour before midnight together with (as per Leslie Halliwell’s suggestion) some Whitstable natives, salmon, trout and strawberries Romanoff, and an ice-cold bottle of either Moët et Chandon or Château d’Yquem on the side. And if you choose both of them…that’s what I do, too.Read More »

Richard Clarke (Benny), a small town lawyer, is not making enough money to marry Janie Brown (Lane), his fiancée. To improve himself, Richard moves to New York City. Although he does not have any clients, Richard tells Janie that he is doing well. She expects to move to New York and marry him.

His assistant Shufro (Anderson) suggests that he could make some money if he became hard and ruthless. The ultimate test of his meanness is ‘stealing candy from a baby’. He is photographed as he pulls a sucker away from a small boy. The picture is printed in the paper under the caption, “Meanest Man in the World.” He is hired to evict an old woman, Mrs. Frances H. Leggitt (Margaret Seddon), from her apartment and more pictures appear in the paper.Read More »