That Certain Sophisticated Something

“Ah, Monsieur Rabelais,” one of a group of deeply amused 16th century Frenchmen says to the smiling man at the head of their table in a vintage New Yorker cartoon. “There is simply no word to describe your earthy, ribald sense of humor.”

And so it is with Ernst Lubitsch, a pillar of Hollywood’s golden age. There perhaps has never been a studio director whose gifts were so universally revered by discerning tastes yet so resistant to being exactly described, to being nailed down and pigeonholed with mere words.

“Lubitsch was a giant,” said Orson Welles. “His talent and originality were stupefying.” Greta Garbo, for once not alone, felt “he was the only great director out there.” And Charlie Chaplin, something of a talent himself, said Lubitsch “could do more to show the grace and humor of sex in a non-lustful way than any other director I’ve ever heard of.”

Yes, but what exactly did he do? Why is it that neither the passing of time nor the wholesale change in moral climate has had any effect on how fresh, how effortlessly charming and amusing the best of his work remains. Even his admirers finally shrugged their shoulders and gave up. “The Lubitsch Touch” is what they called his method (a phrase historian Herman G. Weinberg used for his key study of the man) and left it at that.

“So, This Is Paradise” is the title of a two-week, 16-film Lubitsch tribute that the UCLA Film and Television Archive is putting on starting Tuesday night at the campus’ Melnitz Hall. The already converted can experience the master’s greatest films (except for the Garbo-starring “Ninotchka’) in 35-millimeter prints and glimpse some rarely shown items as well. As for those to whom Lubitsch is at best a name, it’s a chance to find out why so many have thought so highly of him for so long.

To see Lubitsch’s work today, in an age that overvalues coarseness and blatancy in humor, is to experience a kind of delicacy and sophistication that almost doesn’t exist anymore. The Berlin-born director’s films were often set in an imaginary world of fake European principalities with names like Sylvania and Marshavia, a world where men wore tuxedos, women dressed in drop-dead evening gowns and undressed in even more elaborate lingerie, and even Communists never did anything worse than scream “Phooey, phooey and phooey!”

The sine qua non of Lubitsch’s touch was an infallible sense of what is funny. Working closely with his writers (most often Samson Raphaelson), the director constructed the most precise comic clockwork mechanisms, pitch-perfect in their slyness, their timing, their intonations and intimations. Lubitsch choreographed dialogue, he choreographed movement, he even choreographed the camera, which he felt “should comment, insinuate, make an epigram or a bon mot, as well as tell a story.”

Lubitsch’s mastery of insinuation and avoidance of the obvious, especially where romantic/sexual relationships were concerned, were also hallmarks of his style. He understood that what’s not seen can be more tantalizing and delightful than what is, and though Mary Pickford, one of his few detractors, memorably skewered him as “a director of doors,” his depictions of love affairs have a knowing quality that no one else has managed to match.

Finally, there was Lubitsch’s empathy for the human condition, his gentle tolerance for individual foibles leavened by a cynic’s tartness. His innate warmth, savoir-faire and wisdom about life is one of the reasons the French continue to value him so highly: On almost any day in Paris, one of his films will be playing in a repertory theater to an appreciative audience.

The earliest Lubitsch film in the UCLA series is also one of its surprise treats: 1919’s German silent “The Oyster Princess,” with Robert Israel providing live musical accompaniment and the archive providing simultaneous translation of the German intertitles.

The story involves the efforts of the unflappable Mr. Quaker, the Oyster King of America who is living in Berlin, to marry off his temperamental child (‘Your daughter is in a fit of raving madness,” a stone-faced servant accurately reports) to the aristocratic Prince Nucky, a nobleman so impoverished he does his own laundry. The film is broader than what was to come later, but it’s still enough of a charmer that it’s easy to agree with historian Weinberg, who said, “It foreshadowed the method he was to use to such scintillating effect in Hollywood.”

The UCLA series opens with two other silents, “Madame DuBarry,” the French Revolution epic starring Pola Negri, and “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” which offers the experience of seeing an Oscar Wilde play without hearing his famous “I can resist everything except temptation” dialogue. Though of interest, neither film is quintessentially Lubitsch.

For that viewers will have to wait for an April 21 double bill: “Heaven Can Wait” (1943), Lubitsch’s first color film, which stars Don Ameche as a dead roue who tries to convince a very urbane devil that he’s been bad enough for hell, is paired with that classic of pre-Code Hollywood, “Trouble in Paradise” (1932).

With a loving title shot of an inviting double bed leaving little doubt as to what the director’s idea of paradise was, this deliciously immoral item was Lubitsch’s personal favorite and one of those films that even repeated viewings reveal to be nearly perfect.

Opening in Venice with Herbert Marshall as a jewel thief posing as a baron falling in love with Miriam Hopkins’ pickpocket posing as a countess, this symphony of swindling is a feast of impeccable Raphaelson dialogue (‘Marriage is a beautiful mistake which two people make together’) and delicately timed movements by both the camera and the people in front of it. Innuendo never had it so good.

If one actor epitomized Lubitsch’s raffish continental outlook, it was Maurice Chevalier. Co-starring with the debuting Jeanette MacDonald in 1929’s “The Love Parade,” Chevalier plays a seducer so irresistible he has a drawer full of delicate derringers discarded by women who attempted suicide in his presence when he left them.

April 26 features a Chevalier-MacDonald double bill. “The Merry Widow” has the better costumes (her two dozen gowns required four months of work by 22 seamstresses), but “One Hour With You” is ahead in pizazz. Characterized by numerous Chevalier asides to the audience, it focuses on what happens when the happily married couple’s vows are tested by the vivacious Genevieve Tobin, whose character will be forever remembered by Chevalier’s awe-stuck: “Oh that Mitzi.”

The series’ greatest rarity is the only completely serious film Lubitsch ever made. That would be 1932’s “The Man I Killed,” understandably retitled “Broken Lullaby.” The troubled and troubling antiwar film (crippled by an overwrought performance by Phillips Holmes in the lead) centers on a French veteran who seeks out the family of the German soldier he killed in World War I.

On the same April 22 afternoon bill is Lubitsch’s other acknowledged classic, 1940’s gently but potently romantic “The Shop Around the Corner.” All the classic human types are to be found on the staff of Matuschek & Co., a leather-goods store in downtown Budapest, but the treat of all treats is watching the singular relationship develop between co-workers James Stewart and the irreplaceable Margaret Sullavan. This is truly a film for a desert island, something that shows you more the more often you watch it.

The Lubitsch series closes on May 1 with a pair of classic films. “Design for Living,” scripted by Ben Hecht after Noel Coward’s play, has more snappy patter than was usual for Lubitsch in its depiction of the passion best friends Gary Cooper and Fredric March both feel for the zesty Miriam Hopkins.

More classically Lubitsch is the sterling “To Be or Not To Be” (1942) featuring Jack Benny as the greatest Shakespearean actor in Poland and Carole Lombard-in the last role before her untimely death-as his flirtatious wife. As related in Scott Eyman’s excellent biography “Laughter in Paradise,” Lubitsch told interviewers he was “tired of the two established, recognized recipes. Drama with comedy relief and comedy with dramatic relief. I had made up my mind to make a picture with no attempt to relieve anybody from anything at any time.” The result, a wartime film that dared to be a comedy about Hitler and Nazism, flabbergasted audiences and critics when it came out and is just as potent today. As one of its characters said, and as Lubitsch well knew, “a laugh is nothing to be sneezed at.”

In addition to being lionized by the rest of Hollywood, Lubitsch was understandably a special hero to his fellow emigre directors, and Billy Wilder, writing in Action!, the Directors Guild of America magazine, described the following scene at the great man’s funeral after his death at age 55 in 1947:

“After the ceremony, William Wyler and I walked silently to our car. Finally I said, just to say something to break the silence, ‘No more Lubitsch.’ To which Wyler replied, ‘Worse than that-no more Lubitsch films.”’

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The Schedule

Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.: “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” ’Madame Dubarry.”

Saturday at 7:30 p.m.: “Trouble in Paradise,” ’Heaven Can Wait.”

April 22 at 2 p.m.: “Broken Lullaby,” ’The Shop Around the Corner.”

April 22 at 7 p.m.: “Monte Carlo,” ’The Love Parade.”

April 26 at 7:30 p.m.: “One Hour With You,” ’The Merry Widow.”

April 28 at 7:30 p.m.: “The Oyster Princess,” ’The Marriage Circle.”

April 29 at 7 p.m.: “Cluny Brown,” ’That Lady in Ermine.”

May 1 at 7:30 p.m.: “Design For Living,” ’To Be or Not To Be.”

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UCLA’s Melnitz Theater is on the northeast corner of the Westwood campus, near the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Hilgard Avenue. For more information, call (310) 206-FILM.