To see Lubitsch’s work today, in an age that overvalues coarseness and blatancy in humor, is to experience a kind of delicacy and sophistication that almost doesn’t exist anymore. The Berlin-born director’s films were often set in an imaginary world of fake European principalities with names like Sylvania and Marshavia, a world where men wore tuxedos, women dressed in drop-dead evening gowns and undressed in even more elaborate lingerie,

Kenneth Turan, That Certain Sophisticated Something, Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2001, p. 2