The L.A. County Museum of Art kicked off a month-long tribute to the American comedies of director/producer Ernst Lubitsch on Friday night with the 1932 classic Trouble In Paradise (see full schedule here). Lubitsch’s name may not be as recognized today as other Golden Age directors like Alfred Hitchcock or Billy Wilder, but his influence was massive.

Lubitsch was the filmmaker’s filmmaker. He was the one cinematic giants like Orson Welles, John Ford and Francois Truffaut revered. “The Lubitsch Touch,” as his directing style came to be known, was often imitated but never equaled. The great French filmmaker Jean Renoir said that “Lubitsch invented the modern Hollywood.” Billy Wilder (who co-wrote several films for Lubitsch and considered him his mentor) had a sign over his desk that read “What would Lubitsch do.” During the times I spent with Wilder, whenever he would get cranky or clam up, all I had to do was ask about Lubitsch and his face would light up and I’d get a flood of great stories and filmmaking advice. Cameron Crowe called his film Jerry Maguire his tribute to “the Lubitsch Touch.”  When the New York Times Magazine brought Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese together to discuss films in a historic November 1997 interview and the topic turned to the great directors, the first name that popped up was Ernst Lubitsch (Allen: “Whenever people ask me about comic directors, I would have to say Ernst Lubitsch is the best one I’ve ever seen.” Scorsese: “Lubitsch could do more with a closed door than another director could with an open fly.”).

What exactly is “the Lubitsch Touch?” Well, it’s one of the those things that’s almost impossible to accurately verbalize, but you know it the moment you see it. However, if a definition is required, filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich has probably defined it better than anyone else:

“The phrase does connote something light, strangely indefinable, yet nonetheless tangible, and seeing Lubitsch’s films—more than in almost any other director’s work—one can feel this certain spirit; not only in the tactful and impeccably appropriate placement of camera, the subtle economy of his plotting, the oblique dialog which had a way of saying everything through indirection, but also—and particularly—in the performance of every single player, no matter how small the role.”

I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that Trouble In Paradise is his masterpiece. For the longest time, the film was not available on video or DVD so I would make sure to keep an eye out for any revival screenings playing around town and it would take a lot to keep me away. It’s the type of film that feels new and fresh no matter how many times you watch it because it’s so inventive and clever; because of that illusive “Lubitsch Touch.” It’s already been over 24 hours since I saw it again for the sixth or seventh time at the LACMA screening and I’m still drunk from the sheer pleasure of the experience.

In the film, Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins play two world-class thieves who fall in love and decide to con rich widow Kay Francis out of a chunk of her fortune. Made before the Hays Code went into effect in 1934 prohibiting all sorts of bad (i.e. fun) behavior in the movies, Trouble In Paradise would not have made it past the censors had it been made two years later with its unwed lead characters living together in sin and riding off into the sunset together unpunished even though they were *gasp* criminals.

If you want to see an example of “The Lubitsch Touch” at work check out the following scene from the film. Here, Marshall and Hopkins first discover that the other is a thief and how they are a perfect match made in heaven:

It’s hard to go wrong with even minor Lubitsch, but two other pictures that will serve as a fine introduction to the filmmaker are 1940’s The Shop Around The Corner (remade as the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan starring You’ve Got Mail) and 1942’s To Be Or Not To Be (both films are playing in coming weeks as part of the LACMA series).

The Shop Around The Corner, which has a whopping 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer, stars the great Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as co-workers in a Budapest department store who can’t stand each other. Each has a secret pen pal that they fall in love with. What they don’t realize is that they are each other’s pen pals, making for a schizophrenic relationship—in person, they fight like cats and dogs, but when they retreat to the private world of their cherished letters, their true feelings for each other emerge in elegant words.

What elevates this film above most comedies is its humanity. In this and his other comedies, Lubitsch wasn’t afraid to allow real pathos and emotion into his work even if it meant it might “undermine” the laughs. He was more interested in creating “real” characters the audience could identify with. The people who inhabit his movies are almost always vibrant individuals who are a part of a larger community (in this case, the store in which they work which is populated by a cast of endearing eccentrics), but at their core they are alone and lonely; outcasts. It is only when they truly give themselves to the community that’s been there all along do the characters find peace and happiness. His films always remind me of a line that Jack Lemmon says to Shirley MacLaine about living in New York in Lubitsch disciple Billy Wilder’s classic The Apartment:

“Ya know, I used to live like Robinson Crusoe. I mean shipwrecked among 8 million people. And then one day I saw a footprint in the sand and there you were.”

Following is a clip from The Shop Around The Corner. Stewart has discovered that Sullavan is his secret pen pal but she doesn’t yet suspect he is hers. He has bought a necklace that he plans to give to her after revealing that he is the man she loves, but wants to see how she might react first. Notice how Lubitsch shoots the scene in one long take (something he often did) trusting his actors and allowing them to carry the emotion without interruption:

Speaking of a community of outcasts, Lubitsch’s World War II comedy To Be Or Not To Be (which Mel Brooks also remade in 1983) is all about that. An acting troupe in Nazi-occupied Warsaw led by Jack Benny (billed as the actor who put the “ham” in Hamlet) and the elegant Carole Lombard (proof that you could be both drop-dead beautiful and drop-dead funny) are forced to use their thespian skills to fight the Nazis. In his own subtle way, Lubitsch has made a movie about the power of art to triumph against the greatest evils with utter conviction, but without ever forgetting he’s also making a comedy (someone should remake this film and make it about a Korean acting troupe during the Japanese occupation of Korea).

It may be hard to see what the big deal is now, but when this film was released in 1942, the Allies were losing the war and critics and audiences were not too keen on a movie that dared to poke fun at Hitler. This was edgy stuff and Lubitsch paid the price for it. Even now, the film has lost none of its edge. You can imagine if someone like Quentin Tarantino had been alive and making films back then, this is the movie he would have made.

What’s amazing about To Be Or Not To Be is just how suspenseful it is. Rarely do you hear that word associated with a comedy but there’s as much escalating tension here as in a Hitchcock picture as the acting troupe’s plot to defeat the Nazis grows more out of control and dangerous. The film also contains one of my favorite exchanges in any Lubitsch film. Benny’s character (named Josef Tura) is a vain actor and is always fishing for compliments. In one scene, he is disguised as a Nazi professor and has this conversation with a Nazi colonel:

Josef Tura: Her husband is that great, great Polish actor, Josef  Tura. You’ve probably heard of him.
Colonel: Oh, yes. As a matter of fact I saw him on the stage when I was in Warsaw once before the war.
Josef Tura: Really?
Colonel: What he did to Shakespeare we are doing now to Poland.

And there you have a prime example of “the Lubitsch Touch.”

One final clip from To Be Or Not To Be. Carole Lombard rendezvous with one of her handsome young fans (Robert Stack) behind her husband’s back. See how Lubitsch and co-writer Edwin Justus Mayer expertly dance around the censors with the use of double entendres: