Back in Touch With the ‘Lubitsch Touch’

For years, Ernst Lubitsch admirers have bemoaned the lack of home video availability of those essential films from the director’s prodigious Paramount period (1928-1938), especially the revered “Trouble in Paradise.”

But alas, the Lubitsch legion is far too small to matter commercially (“Angel” and “Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife” are available solely because of the marketability of Marlene Dietrich and Claudette Colbert). Besides, we’re so far removed from Lubitsch’s continental world--where sex and love are a blithe social game of elegant manners, sophisticated wit and public deception--that contemporary viewers probably would need subtitles to understand what’s going on.

Then again, a Lubitsch retrospective might be the perfect cure for our postmodern predicament. So rejoice, because a minor miracle occurred last week: the premiere of not only “Trouble in Paradise” but five other romantic gems (plus a delightful two-minute segment from “If I Had a Million”) in a lavish laserdisc boxed set aptly titled “The Lubitsch Touch” (from Image Entertainment, courtesy of Universal, which owns the films).

Granted, the $189.99 price is unusually steep. Yet apparently this was the only way of filling an important historical void by making these films accessible to those who appreciate them and to those who wish to discover them.

And there is much to discover and rediscover, for German-born Lubitsch was one of the supreme masters of the American cinema. His “touch” was as precise and unmistakable as Hitchcock’s, and based on the same principles: Always tell your story creatively and economically with the camera, provide information on a need-to-know basis and deliver surprise or suspense for maximum effect. As Jean Renoir once told Peter Bogdanovich, “Lubitsch invented the modern Hollywood.”

The “droll, cigar-smoking cherub,” as Maurice Chevalier described him, also defined the musical comedy and romantic comedy along the way with his inimitable style. “He had a smooth transition from silent to sound,” says Scott Eyman, author of “Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise,” who also wrote the informative liner notes for the boxed set. “He moved to sound without batting an eye. Sound worked for him and music worked for him.”

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They certainly did. Lubitsch, with his fondness of Hungarian and Viennese musicals as well as the American revue and Tin Pan Alley songs, managed to meld the operetta with vaudeville in a unique and entertaining way, as Eyman suggests.

Lubitsch launched this new screen form in “The Love Parade” (1929), his first successful pairing of Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. The combination of Chevalier’s charm and MacDonald’s beauty makes for a splendid romantic chemistry (in contrast to the knockabout pairing of wiry Lupino Lane and Lillian Roth as their servants).

There’s something refreshingly modern about the marriage of Chevalier’s libidinous military attache to MacDonald’s uptight queen. In an amusing reversal, she slyly flaunts her power over him to the point of complete emasculation. And to regain his honor, he must teach her the merits of equality. She wants to be bad and he wants to have fun, so they learn to be bad and have fun together.

In “One Hour With You” (1932), a remake of Lubitsch’s silent classic “The Marriage Circle,” the rapport between the stars deepens. Chevalier and MacDonald are still having romantic fun being married until he’s tempted by her best friend (Genevieve Tobin). The farcical situation becomes complicated when MacDonald suspects Chevalier of having an affair with the wrong woman, inadvertently pushing him toward Tobin.

In fact, the surreptitious untying of Chevalier’s tie by Tobin at a party has an erotic charge that so thoroughly frustrates him that he turns to the camera and pleads for our sympathy in song. But all’s well in the final epigram when Chevalier tosses MacDonald’s checkerboard onto the bed.

Yet “Monte Carlo” (1930) lacks the same erotic equilibrium with Jack Buchanan romancing MacDonald. You keep waiting for Chevalier to appear and steal her away. But there’s no denying her spirited “Beyond the Blue Horizon” number on the train after fleeing her wedding. Lubitsch makes the moment magical by having the farmers outside the train join in.

“There’s nothing like this rhythm,” Eyman adds. “Lubitsch is erotic but not so sexual, as in screwball comedy, which people are more comfortable with today. There’s a difference. Screwball is coarser and sexual.”

Eyman even believes that Lubitsch anticipated the screwball craze (assisted by screenwriter Ben Hecht) with his much maligned reworking of “Design for Living” (1933), an Americanized romantic comedy starring Fredric March, Gary Cooper and Miriam Hopkins. As these three struggle to maintain their menage a trois, the director strives for a more middle-class nonconformity than Noel Coward’s bohemian rhapsody.

Seen today, “Design for Living” may not be Lubitsch at his best, but at least he’s uncompromising about the love triangle. Then there’s that inspired moment when Edward Everett Horton, having married Hopkins on the rebound, emerges from their bedroom the next morning in utter defeat, and kicks the vase with the two tulips from March and Cooper.

Hopkins is part of a more conventional triangle with Chevalier and Colbert in “The Smiling Lieutenant” (1931), with its textured musical motif. Realizing she’s outclassed, Austrian violinist Colbert helps uptight princess Hopkins win back bored husband Chevalier by teaching her to “Jazz Up Our Lingerie.”

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Lubitsch is at his best, of course, in “Trouble in Paradise” (1932), with Hopkins caught in a triangle once again, this time with fellow jewel thief Herbert Marshall and perfume mogul Kay Francis. Echoes of Moliere and Pirandello grace this sublime masterpiece about masquerading identities, class envy, sexual temptation and social corruption.

And being in love. The “touch” reaches a new level in this restoration comedy. It may not be a musical, but there’s a musical rhythm to the director’s visual style. It’s more polished, more mature, more complex. There’s not a wasted shot--or an easy moment. Take the suspenseful revelation that unmasks Marshall. It’s not conventional, it’s pure craft: an ashtray in the shape of a gondola linking Venice with a familiar face and the opening crime.

Let’s not forget that Lubitsch also had one of the great scripts by his favorite collaborator, Samson Raphaelson, who enhanced the “touch” with those ingenious verbal epigrams: “If Casanova suddenly turned out to be Romeo having supper with Juliet, who might become Cleopatra, how would you start?”

Pure poetry. Or as Billy Wilder best described Lubitsch, his mentor: “You give them the two plus two and let them add it up. They’ll have fun and they’ll play the game with you.”