Word: lubitsch
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...exiles most deeply affected by American culture were not painters at all but writers, musicians and directors, from Bertolt Brecht to Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Lubitsch and Thomas Mann, who gravitated to Los Angeles, worked fitfully but sometimes successfully for the movies and for a while between the Anschluss and the McCarthy years made that palmy city into an extension of the Berlin, the Vienna they had lost. "It is wonderful here on the Pacific, and life is a thousand times better here than in New York," wrote the great director Max Reinhardt to his son. "But I grew...
...were the envy of American producers and art-house audiences. In Sweden, Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjostrom made sweeping dramas of man in tune with or enslaved by nature. Denmark's Carl Dreyer shot his heroically austere The Passion of Joan of Arc in France. The Germans boasted Ernst Lubitsch's puckish historical sagas and Fritz Lang's grand parables. Lang's Siegfried had a fire-breathing dragon, a contraption 50 ft. long operated by eight men; his gigantic, prophetic Metropolis nearly bankrupted its backers...
...Germans. On the set, instead of "Action!" he'd cry "Achtung!" Cinema Europe reveals him as an impishly sadistic fellow--he is seen lifting an actress' skirt while she tries to rehearse. But Hitch could make movies; Hollywood saw that. He went to the U.S., as had Lubitsch, Lang, Sjostrom, Stiller (and his young star Greta Garbo). Some were chased there by Hitler. European cinema was nearly stripped clean...
These little post-Lubitsch touches have Miramax concerned that Kids, scheduled to open July 21, may get an NC-17 rating, which would mean that officially most of the film's young cast could not see it. The Walt Disney Co., Miramax's corporate parent, will not release NC-17 films; so Weinstein, who paid a risky $3.5 million for the $1.5 million-budgeted film, is ready to set up a separate company to distribute Kids. There will be, he vows, no scissoring to get an R rating. As for Clark, he proclaims himself mystified by the clamor: "There...
...scenes with just a vase of flowers (A Woman of Affairs) or bedroom furniture (Queen Christina). She could suggest regal exhaustion with the minutest shift in posture, then fling an extravagant gesture at the movie audience, daring it to laugh. She could laugh at herself too, as in Ernst Lubitsch's delicious Ninotchka (1939). When asked, "Do you want to be alone, Comrade?" she snaps back...