Sex, Politics, and Comedy: The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch by Rick McCormick (review)

Those of us working on Weimar film cultures have long awaited Rick McCormick's important study on Ernst Lubitsch's transnational cinema. Research for this book had previously been published in edited volumes and international scholarly journals beginning in 2010. As such, this work has already productively informed much of the recent scholarly discourse on Lubitsch. In Sex, Politics, and Comedy, McCormick's work is available for the first time in extended form. The book is part of Indiana University Press's German Jewish Cultures book series, which is sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute London. Its place in the series signals the monograph's extensive investment in reading Lubitsch's aesthetic practices across a long career—one which began in 1913 in Berlin and ended in 1947, the year he died, in Hollywood—as those informed by the filmmaker's Jewish heritage. In fact, as McCormick persuasively demonstrates, much of Lubitsch's interest in "underdogs, outsiders, and marginalized peoples" across his long career is tied to his own experiences of marginalization as a Jew with an Eastern European Jewish background living in Germany and then as a German Jew living in the US (9).

McCormick's study is situated at the intersection of at least two subfields of German studies. On the one hand, the book's investment in Lubitsch's Jewishness is informed by scholarship—particularly by the work of Ofer Ashkenazi, Kerry Wallach, and Valerie Weinstein—that has yielded important methodologies to examine Jewish difference in Weimar Germany. This research is motivated by an approach to recognize Jewishness as an important analytical category to examine cultural history without drawing on or contributing to the long history of antisemitic tropes affiliated with identifying and studying Jewish cultural products or people. On the other hand, the book is firmly positioned along a trajectory of recent approaches to German film history, which have sought to challenge the qualifier "German" by foregrounding the transnational features, aesthetic interests, and global audiences of films or filmmakers claimed by the German film canon. Lubitsch—a Jewish filmmaker who established himself in both the German and the US transnational cinema industries and who reached audiences with his films well beyond those two cultural contexts—is a perfect subject to bring these two scholarly trajectories together.

Lubitsch's long career in German and American contexts has been examined in much detail by scholars. As a result of disciplinary divides, most of the scholarship on Lubitsch has either focused on his German films or on his Hollywood films. The few exceptions to this are, as McCormick notes, either books published in German (e.g., work by Hans Helmut Prinzler and Enno Patalas, Herta-Elisabeth Renk, and Herbert Spaich) or work by scholars who only marginally cross the German-American divide (e.g., work by Joseph McBride and Scott Eyman). McCormick's study is the first book-length analysis that focuses on Lubitsch's entire career, examining some of his earliest down to his final films by considering tropes vital for various stages of the filmmaker's career.

An important insight that emerges over the course of McCormick's readings of individual Lubitsch films from his early days in Germany to his last days in Hollywood relates to the affinity he identifies across what he calls the "bad boy" and "bad girl" character types. The book offers a systematic examination of character type in Lubitsch's early comedies, which featured crude men and women in lead roles whose extremity was a vital feature of slapstick laughter. From here, McCormick provides an overview of films made in the US in which these character types undergo a transformation. As demonstrated in the book, Lubitsch's 1920s Hollywood comedies maintained some vital features of gendered transgression characterizing his work in Germany—especially with regard to featuring characters that maintain tentative investments in conservative values around masculinity, femininity, and marriage; however, in comparison to Lubitsch...