"i have a confession to make to you, baron: you are a CROOK!": the ERNST LUBITSCH poll

I am only now, at last, watching a Lubitsch film ("Trouble In Paradise") for the first time and I'm thinking, "Uh oh. New favorite."

have McBride book from library

The full schedule for To Save and Project, MoMA's annual festival of film preservation, is now on line! We open with the premiere of our own restoration of Ernst Lubitsch's FORBIDDEN PARADISE! https://t.co/J066veI356 pic.twitter.com/L3dATE6QzB

— MoMA Film (@MoMAFilm) December 13, 2018

Pola Negri is quite the spitfire in Wildcat.

Just watched Cluny Brown, and it is great fun - Jennifer Jones is wonderful in it

Just watched her firstborn do an interpretive dance in Easy Rider

Is that the daughter who committed suicide?

No, Robert Walker Jr., but that was a good question

The scene where Mr. Matuschek quietly, in an attempt to salvage his dignity, hangs around the shop hoping one of his employees invites him home for Christmas Eve is so perfectly paced that I convulse.

So much stuff in that so well done. Maybe I already commented on it up thread, but I love the scene where the big display pile of boxes gets knocked over, there is stillness for a beat or two, and then they all scramble to restack them.

Like, yes, all these people actually work in this place. Which I dunno when else I have ever thought that, maybe The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

I've been watching the shit out of Lubitsch lately (from the beginning of his talkie career, mostly in order). He's delightful and a new favorite. The Eclipse set of his musicals is one of the best Criterion purchases I've made in a while. Gonna watch Shop Around the Corner for the first time at some point over the next couple of days.

Yes that Eclipse thing is good

Watching Shop Around the Corner tonight, love it forever & always

how much is that belt in the window? the one that says $2.95?

...it’s 2.95

oh no...

Like, yes, all these people actually work in this place.

Exactly this. Matuschek's combination of solicitude and distance -- he knows just enough about Flora living with her mother and no more and doesn't wanna know -- is exactly how bosses are.

The only dud: the actor playing Pepi is straight out of MGM overemoting.

i still like when he gives Mrs Matuschek the business over the phone though

Eh, I like Pepi. I always suspect he's off to pick up a prostitute at the end of the film, but maybe I'm reading it wrong.

He is!

I like when he mutters to Rudi, "Too much. "

yes! love that

It’s true that Pepi seems to be phoning in from a different movie, as Alfred suggests, but I don’t mind him.

he's the comic relief to a comedy!
died super young

Will have to look that up. Also, what's the deal with Schildkraut again, I forget.

He played Dreyfus!

Shop was great! Positively chaste, though, compared to the endless sexcapades I've grown accustomed to in Lubitsch's pre-Code work. I'm kinda just letting it settle over me at the moment but I can see why it's a perennial holiday favorite.

The quaver in Sullavan's voice is sex.

i've only watched 2 lubitches so far, To Be Or Not To Be which i found to be the greatest comedy i've ever seen, and Heaven Can Wait, which i didn't like at all

That’s about right

ha, I like HCW okay, but it's definitely at the bottom of the list of the ones I've seen, p surprised it got even one vote in the thread poll.

TBONTB is amazing. Trouble in Paradise would probably be the consensus rec on what to watch next—and it's fantastic—but I might suggest Ninotchka or The Shop around the Corner instead.

Trouble in Paradise is super necessary. Shop Around the Corner is roughly comparable but less mannered.

Prefer The Shop but Trouble pretty good too.

Also Design for Living and Cluny Brown.

DFL is high on my list of need-to-rewatch; I think the premise misled me to expect something much wilder, so I wasn't sure what I thought of it the one time I saw it. I got Cluny Brown (and Holiday; #onethread) for xmas

Cluny Brown has long been a favorite. Charles Boyer handles pages and pages of English-in-every-sense dialogue like a pro.

Charles Boyer so good, but never got into that movie, sorry.

i fuggin LOVE cluny brown and i mention this at least once a year but jennifer jones in chirrupy mode is peak sexy in that film
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6F9GQ3VlXw

The only films in which I can stand her are this, Beat the Devil, and Duel in the Sun, though I should watch Portrait of Jennie

Nuts to the squirrels!

Where do we stand on his Maurice Chevalier films? I've only seen The Smiling Lieutenant, which does have a bit of the touch, but I'm just not wild about the star's persona.

I really like a few of them.

Two with Jeanette MacDonald, One Hour With You and The Merry Widow, don’t think I’ve seen the others.

By which I mean The Love Parade and the non-Lubitsch Love Me Tonight.

He is really well-cast as a Lubitsch protagonist. He is also good in Lubitsch, um, disciple Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon, although overall that film kind of bugs me.

Chevalier had one mode: chivalrous horndog. It works in his comedies, as long as you don't watch them too closely together. But it jars in Pièges, where he is supposed to be a suspect. (Stalker, yes, but sex murderer?)

The Lubitsch/Chevalier films I've seen are delightful. The MacDonald minus Chevalier film (Monte Carlo) slightly less so (Jack Buchanan comes off as more of a creep than an impish cad).

Really wish either that Trouble in Paradise and The Merry Widow were available on blu-ray or that I was less uptight about buying them as-is (as I know the b-r announcement will drop immediately after I buy a lower-fi copy, as always).

i find his musical stuff mostly unwatchable but that's more a personal prejudice than a critical judgment

This thread revive prompted us to watch Trouble in Paradise tonight, which I'd never seen. Total delight.

Unsurprisingly, Cluny Brown was completely brilliant. So many great lines that won't sound that funny written out: "if England must produce more Belinskis, then we shall produce more Belinskis" and everything Betty Cream says to the two young men in the party scene.

We'd watched Emma. (2020) the previous night, which made for an inadvertently well-programmed double bill about class in England (though perhaps inevitably due to their respective sources, the 1946 film is sharper than the 2020), not to mention that Bill Nighy would fit into CB seamlessly.

the HONORABLE Betty Cream, thanks.

Nice to watch Peter Lawford score with a comedic role perfectly in his range.

The dinner scene with the roast beef.

Belinksi bumping into Cluny and Wilson when out walking.