That Certain Sophisticated Something

There perhaps has never been a studio director whose gifts were so universally revered by discerning tastes yet so resistant to being exactly described, to being nailed down and pigeonholed with mere words.

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,

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.

“After the ceremony, William Wyler and I walked silently to our car. Finally I said, just to say something to break the silence, ‘No more Lubitsch.’ To which Wyler replied, ‘Worse than that-no more Lubitsch films.”’