The Lubitsch Touch: "The Merry Jail" and "The Eyes of the Mummy"

What is "the Lubitsch Touch"? A phrase beloved by Hollywood marketers, the Lubitsch Touch was meant to denote sophisticated comedy, sparkling dialogue (an impression even conveyed, somehow, by his silent movies), urbane treatment of sex and desire, and a seemingly effortless grace that could convey complex jokes and punchlines in a single camera movement. Lubitsch was arguably the most famous emigre director in 1930s Hollywood, as gradually the Lubitsch Touch transformed into its own brand name: a near-guarantee of reliable craftsmanship and elegance. Only Hitchcock's "Master of Suspense" moniker rivaled the Lubitsch Touch for most well-known directorial catchphrase (reportedly, Billy Wilder struggled to find a similar slogan for himself in the 1940s and '50s, and eventually gave up). In Ephraim Katz's estimation, the Lubitsch Touch "was characterized by a parsimonious compression of ideas and situations into single shots or brief scenes that provided an ironic key to the characters and to the meaning of the entire film."

Irony, subtlety, elegance – these descriptors offer an impression of what the Lubitsch Touch might have been, but it's something more than that, too. Some aspects of the film image can't be put into words (that's what makes them cinematic), and in danger of sounding too hyperbolic, this ineffable visual quality seems to subsume Lubitsch's movies. Since I've become a fan of the director (which is basically since I first saw Trouble in Paradise eight years ago) I've suspected that the Lubitsch Touch is more of a fleeting aura than a quantifiable stylistic trait. Hopefully, if visual evidence of the master's touch can be parsed out, I'll be able to do so by charting his filmography, in chronological order, as fully as possible (which unfortunately is not as full as one might hope: many of Lubitsch's films, including most of his silents, are now lost).

A young Mr. Lubitsch

Lubitsch was born in 1892 Berlin to a Jewish family. His father was a tailor (a profession that features prominently in some of Lubitsch's films, notably The Shop Around the Corner) and Ernst, drawn to acting but encouraged to continue the family business, led a double life, serving as bookkeeper for his father by day and acting in cabarets and music halls at night. In 1911, he joined Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater; a year later, he was hired as the handyman for Bioscope Film Studios, and in 1913 began acting in a series of film comedies as a character named Meyer, who represented a then-popular brand of ethnic Jewish humor. (This is according to Lubitsch's biography; these films are now lost, so it's hard to know exactly what this "ethnic Jewish humor" constituted.)

Gradually turning his attention to directing, Lubitsch garnered acclaim in Germany for his tragic fantasy The Eyes of the Mummy in 1918, but it wasn't until 1921 that he found success in the US. In that year, three of his dramas – Madame du Barry, aka Passion, 1919; Anna Boleyn, aka Deception, 1920; and Carmen, aka Gypsy Blood, 1921 – were released stateside and chosen by The New York Times as three of the most "important" movies of 1921. (His 1919 comedy The Oyster Princess, though now seen as his first masterpiece, was less famous at the time.) Lubitsch left Germany for Hollywood in 1922, and it was there that he solidified his legendary status.

Yet if it was his historical epics and dramas that first brought him esteem, it's his sophisticated comedies that eventually revealed him as a master of the craft. Whether in elaborate musicals or smaller-scale comedies, he seems to display a bemused fondness for his characters and their sexual hangups and desires. Indeed, some of his movies, joyous as they are, were scandalous upon their release: as Michael Wilmington writes, his films were "at once elegant and ribald, sophisticated and earthy, urbane and bemused, frivolous yet profound. They were directed by a man who was amused by sex rather than frightened of it – and who taught a whole culture to be amused by it as well." Another of Lubitsch's favorite satirical targets was money, specifically the kind of excessive wealth that carries a semi-automatic excuse for horrible behavior. Both sex and money were touchy subjects for American audiences, but Lubitsch's elegance and wit turned self-ridicule into a gentle diversion (particularly during the Great Depression, when Lubitsch was arguably at his peak).

The Merry Jail (1917)

But let's flash back to Berlin, 1917, when Lubitsch made his earliest surviving film: The Merry Jail. It's surprising how much this early effort encapsulates and foreshadows Lubitsch's later comedic style: a movie about shameless carnality, both spirited and subtle, The Merry Jail lampoons a wartime Berlin in which wealthy aristocrats entertain themselves by initiating torrid affairs and getting obscenely drunk. The gravity of the Great War doesn't seem to affect these characters at all. If the interwar Weimar period of Germany was known for its amoral hedonism and the disastrous simultaneity of lavish spending and severe poverty (a social unrest ridiculed by Fritz Lang's Metropolis, among other films), that period seems to have its origins in the freewheeling culture portrayed here. Lubitsch, though, doesn't judge his characters or this society, perhaps seeing moral conservatism as a restrictive force.

The plot is a familiar one (it was actually adapted from Strauss' operetta Die Fledermaus): Frau von Reizenstein, an aristocratic wife well aware of her husband's adulterous affairs, attends the same costume ball as he does one night, unbeknownst to him; they end up flirting unabashedly, with Herr von Reizenstein unwittingly attempting to initiate an "extramarital" tryst with his own wife. There are other dalliances transpiring: between the Reizensteins' maid and a doddering aristocrat (Mizi the maid is clearly enjoying her sexual liberty: upon tripping on a staircase while entering the costume ball, she turns to the gentleman escorting her inside and flirtatiously says, "That was my first bad move of the day"); or between Frau von Reizenstein and an overzealous suitor named Egon Storch. Basically every relationship is a potentially sexual one, with a passionate affair always lurking in wait. The sexual openness is summed up by a piece of advice given to Mizi by her sister: "If someone tries to kiss you, don't giggle. That's not chic."

There's also the merry jail of the title, a jail that Herr von Reizenstein is supposed to occupy: given his "scandalous behavior" one drunken evening, the police have issued a warrant for his arrest and one-day imprisonment (a warrant he ignores in order to attend the costume ball). The jailer at the prison, Quabbe, is at least as sexually frank (and as drunkenly lecherous) as the rest of the ensemble, and his homosexuality is displayed brazenly: he continually strokes one prisoner's arm, kisses another on the lips, tells another one that he really likes him. (Quabbe is played by Emil Jannings, who would become famous for complex dramatic roles in later classics such as F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh and Josef von Sternberg's Der Blaue Engel. Here, outfitted with a gnarly mustache, Jannings demonstrates devious lunacy in one of his rare comedic roles.) Lubitsch's pre-Code Hollywood movies are known for their sexual openness, but the jailer's homosexuality is a liberty that would be unavailable to him later on in his career – a surprising indication of movies' licentiousness before the strictures of social censorship clamped down.

The Merry Jail

While most film comedies in 1917 were essentially vaudeville acts performed in front of the camera (which isn't necessarily a criticism – Chaplin made poetry out of such a setup), Lubitsch here shows an early flair for using the camera and montage editing to deliver the punchline of a joke. The film opens, for example, with Frau von Reizenstein searching throughout the house for her absent husband; when she retreats to the den and reads the arrest warrant that's been issued for him, the camera slowly tilts down to reveal the presumably-still-drunk husband passed out underneath the desk. The joke's not quite over yet: feeling something brushing against her legs, Frau von Reizenstein agitatedly informs Mizi that the house has mice. In response, the maid offers her an elaborate mousetrap, unexpectedly conveyed to us via a close-up insert. Throughout this sequence, Lubitsch reveals himself as a master joke-teller through purely visual means (camera movement, varying shot scales and edits) as the scene culminates in what might be the visual equivalent of the punchline: a close-up.

Sometimes, on the other hand, Lubitsch's jokes are so subtle you're not even sure if they're jokes at all. At the end of the aforementioned sequence, for example, the besotted husband gingerly gives the maid his cane and top hat. As he extends his overturned top hat to her, he seems to look inside and come perilously close to vomiting into it; when the maid takes it, she glances into it, recoils in disgust, and holds the hat at arm's length while she exits the scene. Lubitsch doesn't offer us a closer angle so it's impossible to know for sure, but the suggestion is that this callow aristocrat lives a life of privileged luxury while overdrinking so heavily that he throws up into his accoutrements – itself a sly and subtle conflation of elegance and vulgarity.

Herr von Reizenstein is undeniably a shallow cad who inflates his self-worth by racking up adulterous affairs – in a modern romantic comedy, he'd be the smug asshole competing with the sensitive hero for a woman's affections. But all ends well in The Merry Jail: the following morning, as the whole ensemble is deliriously hungover, Frau and Herr von Reizenstein make up after she reveals she was the masked paramour from the night before, Mizi and her aristocrat drive off together, and Quabbe the jailer admits his suppressed feelings for the unreciprocating prison warden. Sexuality is an amusing riddle here: Lubitsch doesn't judge Herr von Reizenstein's adulteries or Quabbe's homoerotic longings. Most mainstream romantic comedies are obliged to supply a happy ending which takes the form of a man-woman romantic union; The Merry Jail suggests a more chameleonic sexuality, which doesn't abide by the rigid contours of a cinematic genre.

The Eyes of the Mummy (1918)

Unfortunately, there's a lot less to say about The Eyes of the Mummy, which Lubitsch made a year later (1918) for the UFA film studio. To modern viewers, it may seem strange that Lubitsch first found success and acclaim thanks to large-scale dramas like this; even the visual style of Eyes of the Mummy seems less exuberant than in his comedies, and the narrative is patched together from a number of outworn Gothic horror and melodramatic cliches.

The Eyes of the Mummy was the first film collaboration between Lubitsch (graduating to feature-length drama) and Pola Negri, who would be invited to Hollywood (along with Lubitsch) by Paramount in 1922. Negri would go on to become one of Hollywood's most adored stars (especially in her roles as Rudolph Valentino's love interest) and the first in a long line of "exotic" actresses imported to the US from Europe (Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, etc.). Here, she plays "Queen Ma" – actually not a queen at all (much less a mummy), but a young Egyptian country girl kidnapped by the villainous Radu many years ago and imprisoned in a tomb located in a pyramid somewhere outside of Cairo. (Emil Jannings, in semi-blackface, appears once again as Radu.) When Ma is rescued by a German painter on vacation and returns with him to Berlin, Radu follows soon after (now the servant to a nobleman named Prince Hohenfels) and vengefully searches Berlin for his "queen." Firmly placed in the genre of tragic melodrama, Eyes of the Mummy proceeds to its inevitably bleak conclusion; there's not much in the way of horror (and, as many critics have pointed, nothing at all in the way of mummies), so we're basically left with a lugubrious drama about starcrossed lovers.

Both Negri and Jannings belong to the emotive, theatrically-based style of silent-film acting that puts off most modern viewers; while their performances here can be enjoyed in a markedly distinct, almost abstract time-capsule way, they do little to draw us emotionally into the movie. The problem is compounded by the fact that the story is riddled with irrational holes (who exactly is Radu? why does he seem supernatural at times and powerless at others? what were the painter and Prince Hohenfels doing in Cairo?) that demonstrate a reliance on secondhand genre tropes and plot structures. Quite obviously shot on a low budget (the interiors of the "mummy's" tomb especially emphasize the barebones nature of the production), The Eyes of the Mummy today seems like little more than a curio in the director's early career, although there is one shot that nearly makes it worth watching: a reverse tracking shot during the climax that retreats in horror as Radu approaches menacingly. It's a sequence of visual intensity and narrative engagement that most of the film is sorely lacking.

An UFA advertisement for Die Augen der Mumie Ma (The Eyes of the Mummy Ma), 1918

NEXT UP: Another blithe sex comedy, the cross-dressing I Don't Want to Be a Man (1918); and another exotic melodrama with Pola Negri, Carmen (aka Gypsy Blood), 1918.