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“How would Lubitsch have done it?” asked a sign above Billy Wilder’s door. Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947) was the first of the great European directors to establish himself in Hollywood and by far the most influential. Having made hit ribald comedies and triumphant spectacles in his native Germany, Lubitsch revolutionized American movies with a sui generis subtlety, style, visual wit, and sophisticated innuendo—“The Lubitsch Touch” (as definitive a trademark as Master of Suspense would be for Hitchcock) —inventing the modern movie musical and romantic comedy in the process.
In the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, he was, with Cecil B. DeMille, the most famous director in Hollywood (in Preston Sturges’ SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS, Veronica Lake is desperate for a screen test with Lubitsch) and, such was his prestige, the only one to retain full artistic control throughout his career. Years after Lubitsch’s death, Wilder (an up-close observer as a two time scenarist for The Master) remarked, “For years we all tried to find the secret of The Lubitsch Touch. If we were lucky, we’d sometimes make a film like Lubitsch. Like Lubitsch, not real Lubitsch.”
Presented with generous support from the Robert Jolin Osborne Fund for American Classic Cinema of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s