Why is it that neither the passing of time nor the wholesale change in moral climate has had any effect on how fresh, how effortlessly charming and amusing the best of his work remains. Even his admirers finally shrugged their shoulders and gave up. “The Lubitsch Touch” is what they called his method (a phrase historian Herman G. Weinberg used for his key study of the man) and left it at that.

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