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  • Sex, Politics, and Comedy: The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch by Rick McCormick
  • Rob McFarland
Rick McCormick. Sex, Politics, and Comedy: The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch. Indiana UP, 2020. 357 pp. Paper, $48.00; cloth, $95.00.

Every few years, a new anthology of films by the director Ernst Lubitsch appears on the market. These multiplying collections supply viewers with many of their favorite films, from the gender-bending Ich möchte kein Mann sein (1918; I Don’t Want to Be a Man, 2005) to the antifascist To Be or Not to Be (1942). Recently, English-language historians and academics have been doing their part to digest Lubitsch’s huge cinematic oeuvre and to draw the prolific director into the center of scholarly discourse about Weimar-era film. There have been no fewer than five books in the last three years about Lubitsch, from Joseph McBride’s 2018 How Did Lubitsch Do It? to Sabine Hake’s excellent Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch (2020).

In this crowded territory, McCormick carefully stakes out his project: to explore the transnational nature of Lubitsch’s comedies. Calling his films “transnational” does not simply refer to Lubitsch’s emigration from Berlin’s UFA studios to MGM and Paramount Studios (among others) in Hollywood. As McCormick convincingly argues, Lubitsch’s mobility as a [End Page 125] filmmaker grew out of the cacophonous mixture of crossing and competing identities not only in his films but in his life as well. Growing up in his father’s clothing shop on Schönhauser Allee (a part of Berlin’s celebrated Jewish clothing industry), Lubitsch became fascinated with the all-encompassingefforts of assimilation. As an actor and later as a film-maker, Lubitsch created comedic characters who explore the status of the racial and economic outsider. First using a series of “bad boy” Jewish antiheroes such as the eponymous shoe seller in Schuhpalast Pinkus (1916; Shoe palace Pinkus) and later a host of “bad girl” characters epitomized in the roles of Ossi Oswalda, Lubitsch skewers Wilhelminian German—and later American—sexual, racial, and class hierarchies. His penniless antiheroes finagle their way up the social ladder and into the hearts and beds of middle-class shop owners’ daughters and wives, crass arrivistes invading old-money Europe across boundaries of race, language, manners, wealth, and morals.

McCormick deftly places each film in its historical and cultural context. Lubitsch’s border-crossing characters appeared in a medium that was in its own transnational heyday. The 1920s saw the rise of unprecedented international collaboration in terms of film production and financing. Lubitsch was involved in such a company, the European Film Alliance. It is the international success of Lubitsch’s Berlin films that eventually brought him to the United States, a success based in no small part on the film’s transnational sensibilities. Although McCormick’s book is divided into two sections, titled “Berlin” and “Hollywood,” he does not separate Lubitsch’s two artistic homes with an ideological or biographical caesura. Whereas lesser storytellers might focus on the transatlantic break between the places of Lubitsch’s career, McCormick teases out the continuities between his earlier and later comedies.

Among all of the recent books about Ernst Lubitsch, McCormick’s Sex, Politics, and Comedy stands out for two reasons. First, the book maintains a fine balancing act between academic prose and accessible, fascinating film history. In his discussion of the role of Pola Negri’s titular character in Madame Dubarry (1922), for example, McCormick carefully explores “the heavy risk involved in the meteoric rise of an outsider within a hierarchical society with little tolerance for the upward mobility of outsiders or anyone at the bottom of the hierarchy” (85–86). A second reason that the book stands out: all those who teach film will appreciate the way that McCormick backs up his compelling ideas with specific examples from the film’s cinematography, mise-en-scène, and editing. His reading [End Page 126] of scenes from The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927), for example, focuses on the makeup of the Mexican lead, Ramón Novarro, and the way Lubitsch deepens the character of the prince...

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