You know the way Cary Grant always seemed to have his own rhythm, his own syntax, his own inimitable style--his own vaguely transcontinental nationality, even? That's not just a testament to his star power. In his case it was also a legacy of the English music hall from which he came, as surely as was the clowning of Chaplin before him.
Indeed the influx of theatrical traditions and talent, like Grant's, into the American cinema in the early days of sound may have, as film buffs have lamented, set the medium's visual innovations back at least a decade--but it was an invasion that proved healthy for the medium's commerce and eventually its soul.
Yes, personalities on the American screen in the 1930s were large--larger than they are now, in any case. And there's a certain distinct pleasure in revisiting even the hoariest relics of that era: the mountainous double takes, the eye rolls, the fits and starts, the lazzi that would have played to the back row of a theatre but which few film directors bothered to tone down, at least at first. Indeed for most of the '30s, film was not so much a director's medium as the product of writers hired to churn out material for stage-seasoned performers who knew how to put across a gag, sell a song, and hit their light.
Many of these films haven't aged well, of course: For every Hawks and Cukor, there were innumerable studio hacks whose approach to directing was to keep their head, and their overhead, down. The filmmaker who met the aesthetic challenges of early sound with the greatest aplomb, and with a craft rooted deeply in the traditions of both stage and early silent cinema, was Berlin emigre Ernst Lubitsch. His films have aged well--indeed they seem to have been recognized as having a timeless quality even in their day--not least because Lubitsch had an unerring instinct for directing actors for the screen, for giving their theatrical flair its due but infusing it with a gentleness, a subtlety, that was unique for its time, or any time.
Touch Tone
For instance, Lubitsch in essence created Maurice Chevalier, a gadabout who arrived in the States in the 1920s with a thick French accent and a crude burlesque style nobody knew what to make of, and who himself doubted he could play nobility until Lubitsch stuck him in a uniform opposite Jeanette McDonald in 1929's The Love Parade--the film with which Lubitsch, by the way, also in essence created the film musical in one fell swoop. Unleashing Chevalier and the film musical on the world sounds like a lot to answer for--except that to see both in their innocence, under Lubitsch's faultless care, is to witness a flowering that simultaneously looks back on a dying age and, with the dubious gift of hindsight, ahead to inevitable decadence.
It's that way with all of Lubitsch's best work: His actors glitter, but the light comes from within. Jeanette McDonald, the Iron Butterfly herself, retained her glint for Lubitsch but added warmth; she's even almost sexy in his delectably absurd 1934 rendition of The Merry Widow. He mined the erotic humor of Garbo's ethereal blankness in 1939's Ninotchka, and, most miraculous of all, got her to laugh along with him. He got the first full-blooded lead performance out of Jimmy Stewart in 1940's tender The Shop Around the Corner--a film which proves that the director's famed European "sophistication" finally wasn't about black ties and fuming butlers but about universal amusement and empathy. The Lubitsch touch was a common touch, as well.
It was also an extremely hands-on touch: An actor who'd worked for Max Reinhardt, the preeminent German impresario of the post-WWI era, and who'd had success as a comic lead in a series of German silent films, Lubitsch didn't just give line readings to his actors on the set. He acted out every part, male or female, in a hilariously thick German accent that reportedly gave his performers an "idea" of what he wanted. For his romantic leads to try to imitate this short, cigar-chomping tummler seems ludicrous--there's a priceless photo of the 5-foot-2 director gesticulating to the 6-foot-2 Gary Cooper. Still, this approach may explain the consistency of tone in his films: the teasing, modulated diction giving way to sharp bursts and left turns, all orchestrated with an exquisite sense of scale and timing.
It's distinctly not the rapid-fire screwball timing of Hawks or Sturges. Even at his most outrageous, Lubitsch had a devilish gift for indirection; he'd cut away to a closed door, to a soundless view of chaos through a window, to a shot of Jimmy Stewart's bare legs (to prove to his amour that he's not bow-legged, in the memorably perverse topper of Shop Around the Corner). At the climax of the daffy Wilder/Brackett-penned Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938), an unhinged Gary Cooper breaks loose from a straitjacket after being ravished against his will by Claudette Colbert in a loony bin; looking like he may attack her, he instead flops his loose straps around her and dips her into a fadeout kiss... but the last word goes to Edward Everett Horton, who peeks in at the happy couple, deadpans, "Nothing," and shuts the door.
The Limits of Art
More likely to have picked up direct cues from Lubitsch's line readings were a gallery of fellow emigres--outsized types like Sig Rumann, the blundering Col. Erhardt of To Be or Not To Be (1942) and the blustery Iranoff of Ninotchka; or Herman Bing, a mincing homunculus who brings perfect rococo shadings to small comic parts in Merry Widow and Bluebeard's; or, my favorite, Felix Bressart, the avuncular family man Pirovitch in Shop, the hearty Buljanoff in Ninotchka, and, most movingly, the soulful Greenberg in To Be or Not To Be.
That last film--a black comedy about Polish stage folks pulling a fast one on a group of boorish uninvited guests, also known as the Nazi Occupation--is where tastes diverge, and where, for many critics at the time and since, Lubitsch lost his touch. Admittedly the film may have one too many "concentration camp Erhardt" jokes, but with the benefit of hindsight--and with similar ground since trod by Mel Brooks and, God help us, Roberto Benigni--what comes through is not just the enduring shock value of Nazis seen as comic figures, and the buried rage beneath it, but the targets of film's lovingly satirical embrace: actors who respond to the threat by acting, with almost too much relish, their way out of trouble.
Lubitsch couldn't do much with the stiff Jack Benny, who looks grateful to be in a good film for a change, or with a gawky young Robert Stack. But his work with supporting players is unerring, and what he did with Carole Lombard, as a glamorous actress who instinctively realizes the limits of her art even as she employs it within an inch of her life, still takes my breath away. It's Lombard's first mature performance (and, tragically, her last--she died in a plane crash not long after filming). This is not the ditzy hysteric of Twentieth Century or Nothing Sacred or My Man Godfrey. Her Maria Tura is an honest-to-God woman with both the good sense to heartily enjoy the play-acting of her theatrical life, onstage and off, and the plain moral sense to know the difference between artifice and reality when it bites.
It's such a richly felt and resonant performance, I think, not just because it deepens Lombard's comic gifts but also because this bittersweet blend--an embrace of the theatrical, combined with an unsentimental sense of human proportion is Lubitsch in a nutshell. BSW