What Would Ernst Lubitsch Have Done?
By A. O. SCOTT (from The New York Times)

A famous sign on the wall in Billy Wilder's office asked, ''What would Lubitsch have done?'' Wilder meant the question as a tribute to Ernst Lubitsch, his master, mentor and sometime boss -- a comic filmmaker whose elegant and effortless command represented, to Wilder and many others, the apogee of cinematic wit, sophistication and technical precision. These qualities are what critics mean when they talk about ''the Lubitsch touch,'' which is also the name of the three-week retrospective that began on Friday at Film Forum. The phrase, which honors Lubitsch's light tone and meticulous pacing, also implies a limiting judgment, as if he were, in the end, little more than a playful, skillful technician. It would never do, of course, to speak of ''the Lubitsch vision,'' ''the Lubitsch ideology'' or ''the Lubitsch Weltanschauung'' -- such talk would be soundly and justly mocked in one of his pictures -- but his unerring jokes and deftly plotted conundrums have an undertow of unsettling wisdom. His vaunted style is indeed a way of seeing the world, and his acute observations of human behavior add up to something like a theory of human nature.

Lubitsch started out, like so many great American directors of his era, in Germany, where he worked from 1915 to 1923. During this prolific period, generously represented in Film Forum's program (often with live musical accompaniment), Lubitsch made everything from costume romps (starring Emil Jannings as, for instance, Henry VIII, Louis XV and a lovestruck Pharoah), to ribald comedies (with the smoldering Pola Negri). He came to Hollywood in the advance guard of the Weimar and Nazi-era artistic emigration, and made ''Rosita'' starring Mary Pickford as a Spanish singer. In the next few years, he directed, among others, ''Lady Windermere's Fan'' and ''The Student Prince,'' respectively one of the nimblest screen adaptations of an Oscar Wilde play and one of the first memorable movie musicals -- impressive achievements, even more so considering that they were made before the advent of sound.

His silent films give ample evidence of Lubitsch's mastery of the camera -- his ability to convey nuance, irony and surprise through composition and camera movement. The addition of dialogue exposed the gap between what people say and what their postures, eyes and faces betray. Again and again the characters in his sound films pretend (or believe themselves) to be something entirely different from what they evidently are. Garbo's ''Ninotchka'' (1939) imagines herself to be a dour emissary of the revolutionary proletariat. It takes Melvyn Douglas, a feckless Parisian count, to show her that she is -- not quite instead, but in addition -- a woman of pleasure and vitality, susceptible to the decadent capitalist charms of champagne and modernist millinery. James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, in ''The Shop Around the Corner'' (1940), act, at work, as though they detest each other, oblivious to the fact that they have already, in anonymous letters, confessed their rapturous love. A classic Lubitsch couple, they persist in fooling themselves and one another, walking a tightrope poised between disillusionment and revelation.

IN ''Trouble in Paradise,'' Gaston and Lily, a pair of grifters (Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins), make their way through Europe masquerading as world-weary nobles. In their first encounter, we are not sure who is predator and who prey, and the delayed disclosure of their partnership sets up the movie's central scam, which seems to be aimed at the bored, impulsive Mme. Colet (Kay Francis) -- a widow determined to burn through the fortune her late husband, a perfume magnate, has left her. Who is using whom turns out to be a complex question. As so often with Lubitsch, cynicism and romance are as firmly entwined as embracing lovers, their breath mingling like Marshall's and Hopkins's in the nose-to-nose parley that precedes their first kiss. ''Trouble in Paradise,'' made in 1932, is a late gasp of Continental sexual candor before the imposition of the 1933 Production Code, but the Code's strictures were, for Lubitsch, a spur to further ingenuity. If he could no longer project the shadows of an unmarried couple onto a velvet divan (one of the most delicious shots in ''Paradise''), he could still make a closed door, an unsealed envelope, or a loosened bowtie sigh with erotic implication. Such things might now seem amusingly old-fashioned. But Billy Wilder's question nonetheless remains tantalizing. Lubitsch's fingerprints, however smudged or scrubbed, are detectable on any recent romantic comedy you could name, since it was he who simultaneously invented the genre and perfected it. His films also evoke a world that has irretrievably vanished (if, indeed, it ever really existed) -- a silvery planet of evening clothes and tulip-shaped champagne glasses, cigarette cases and diamond-studded clutches, in which aristocrats and arrivistes, con artists and Bolsheviks cavort and connive, seducing and betraying one another until nobody can tell which is which or who is who.

''We shall never see his like again,'' Andrew Sarris wrote in ''The American Cinema,'' ''because the world he celebrated had died -- even before he did -- everywhere except in his own memory. Encountering Lubitsch is, inevitably, an exercise in nostalgia. But if Lubitsch, who died in 1947, was the elegist of a Continental civilization ruled equally by passions and by protocols, he was also something of a prophet. His movies, for one thing, display a remarkable political savvy and a humanist's suspicion of ideological grandiosity. ''To Be or Not to Be'' (1942) was rebuked for making light of the Nazis, but, as Mr. Sarris noted, ''for Lubitsch, it was sufficient to say that Hitler had bad manners, and no evil was then inconceivable.'' Similarly, ''Ninotchka,'' while glancing at the murderous brutality of the Soviet Union and acknowledging the revolutionary idealism it grew out of, succinctly illuminates a central moral failing of communism, which was its denial of the human capacity for pleasure.

''Ninotchka'' ends up proposing a kind of moral average between the blue bloods and the Bolsheviks. In confessing his love of the Soviet emissary, the Count admits his sentiments might be terribly ''middle class,'' a phrase that also sneaks into ''The Shop Around the Corner,'' to describe the shop's clientele. It might also describe both Lubitsch's ideal audience and his ideal civilization.

The happy ending in ''Shop Around the Corner'' coincides with the Christmas rush -- a notion that seems Utopian when you recall that the movie, set in Budapest, opened in the terrible winter of 1940. At the end of ''Ninotchka,'' the Count and the Bolsheviks have opened a restaurant (which is already having labor troubles). Lubitsch's ideal world is one in which human imperfection is not only acknowledged but exalted -- a world of shopping, eating, sex and blithe hypocrisy. I suspect that if he lived in our world, Lubitsch would have known just what to do.

Film history books recount how the four musicals directed by Ernst Lubitsch in the early years of sound — "The Love Parade" (1929), "Monte Carlo" (1930), "The Smiling Lieutenant" (1931) and "One Hour With You" (1932) — helped define what talking movies would be. Now all four have been released in "Lubitsch Musicals," an indispensable boxed set from Eclipse.

Lubitsch's precise, highly stylized direction of actors, his genius for concentrating the maximum amount of narrative information in a few carefully chosen shots and symbolic details, his masterful sense of ellipsis (presenting only the most important story points and leaving the rest to the viewer's imagination) — all these devices and more had emerged during Lubitsch's silent-film period, and by 1929 had already been enshrined as "the Lubitsch touch."

But Lubitsch wasn't content to let things stand, not when faced with the transformative technical advance represented by sound. Where so many of the early musicals are simply passive records of already established stage hits (like RKO's 1929 "Rio Rita") or strung-together highlights that showcase a studio's stars in various production numbers (like Warner Brothers' "Show of Shows," also 1929), the Lubitsch films are full-fledged book musicals that integrate their songs into their plots and frequently move, operetta style, from spoken dialogue to recitative to full musical performances. They are light, fluid and graceful at a time when the heavy apparatus of the talkies was threatening to render movies flat and stagebound.

For reviewers at the time, these movies were buoyant, witty and casual in a way the plodding stage adaptations were not. Less remarked upon then but more important in the development of the medium was Lubitsch's innovative way of using sound.

For Lubitsch the new medium wasn't just for recording dialogue but also for bringing out the musicality contained in sound effects. (See in "Monte Carlo" how the chugging of a train engine slips into the rhythm of "Beyond the Blue Horizon," sung by Jeanette MacDonald.) He uses sound to suggest whole realms of off-screen space unavailable to the silent film, employing sound cues as a way of replacing dialogue (like the trumpet call in "The Smiling Lieutenant"), much as he would use visual cues to replace entire sequences of dramatic action.

Their formal and historical importance aside, these films remain marvelously adult entertainments, at ease with human desire (and its inevitable conflicts with the institution of marriage) in ways that movies of our own time either ignore or trivialize into crude physical comedy. Lubitsch's coquettishly liberated women (Jeanette MacDonald in three of the four films here; Claudette Colbert in the fourth, "The Smiling Lieutenant") unabashedly enjoy sex as much as their rakish mates (Maurice Chevalier in three; Jack Buchanan, a gifted but now forgotten British musical star, in "Monte Carlo").

In "One Hour With You," the last of Lubitsch's musicals for Paramount (he would make one more, perhaps his greatest, for MGM: the 1934 version of "The Merry Widow"), the Chevalier character, a happily married (to MacDonald) Parisian doctor, eventually gives in, despite his better instincts, to the sexual blandishments of his wife's best friend (Genevieve Tobin). They spend a late night together, during which, Lubitsch clearly indicates, they enjoy a sexual dalliance — for which MacDonald smilingly forgives him at the film's conclusion. Attitudes like this would disappear with the enforcement of the Production Code in 1934, seldom to return to American movies again.

Which is not to say that beneath their bubbling Art Deco surfaces these films are not actively and even philosophically engaged with moral questions. The masterpiece in this collection, and the film that leaps out from the others for its dark undertones and sharply painful emotions, is "The Smiling Lieutenant," filmed as Lubitsch's own marriage was collapsing.

According to Scott Eyman's biography of Lubitsch, the director had discovered that his first wife was having an affair with his best friend and longtime collaborator, the screenwriter Hanns Kräly. There had been a public fistfight with Kräly, divorce papers had been served, and Lubitsch had left Hollywood for Paramount's studios in Astoria, Queens. In the film Chevalier plays an Austrian officer who is forced to give up his mistress — a beer garden violinist, played by Colbert — when he is claimed as a mate by the unattractive and uncultivated princess of a neighboring country (Miriam Hopkins, in her second film role).

For once, Lubitsch does not make the film's point of view Chevalier's (undergoing his own divorce at the time, Chevalier here seems an unusually strident, even hysterical figure) but Colbert's. Her character's sacrifice at the film's finale — she instructs Hopkins in the finer points of choosing lingerie, then slips away, leaving her lover to his new bride — recapitulates a note in Lubitsch's great silent adaptation of "Lady Windermere's Fan" (1925) and expands it into a major chord of melancholy and mature resignation.

Because "Lubitsch Musicals" is a project of Eclipse, the budget division of the Criterion Collection, it is not quite as perfect as would be expected. The liner notes are informative but minimal; there is no audio commentary; and a few obvious supplementary items are missing, like the three Chevalier production numbers that Lubitsch directed for the 1930 revue film "Paramount on Parade." (In the wishful thinking department, it would have added much to include "Broken Lullaby." A pacifist plea made between "The Smiling Lieutenant" and "One Hour With You," this is one of Lubitsch's rare straight dramas and one of his most powerful films. Like so much of the important Paramount product of the 1930s, "Lullaby" has been allowed to drop into obscurity by its current owner, Universal Pictures.)

The set's prints show some light speckling and scratches, though nothing too serious, given the age of the films. Surprisingly, "The Smiling Lieutenant" is the best transfer here and looks close to perfect — remarkable for a film that was considered lost until the 1980s, when a print was found in the Danish film archives.