Word: lubitsch
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...Weimar set among palm trees. In Strangers in Paradise, John Russell Taylor, film critic of the Times of London, tells ironic tales out of court about the Hollywood settlers. Actors like Conrad Veidt and Otto Preminger, fleeing from Hitler, were hired to impersonate Nazis in war movies. Ernst Lubitsch, eager to propagandize against the Third Reich, directed a delicate, tentative farce, To Be or Not to Be, starring Jack Benny as a Polish ham actor. In the film a German general appraises Benny: "What he did to Shakespeare, we are now doing to Poland." For his efforts, Lubitsch was pilloried...
This is a touch of Mel Brooks rather than Ernst Lubitsch, though elsewhere Korda exhibits a considerable talent for imitating the sophisticated innuendoes of that German-born film maker. Worldly Goods is, in fact, a trove of mimicked styles. Beyond its undeniable entertainment qualities, the book can be read as a clinic on what publishers call a page-turner. The author-editor goes one step further and ensures subliminal product identification, with his name centered at the top of every other page...
...Even in Hollywood, structure is now a word you are apt to hear only from Bel Air real estate agents. Adventurous directors snapped the straight spine of traditional drama into a series of vertebral vignettes. The standard comedy structure, which had kept stage and screen humming from Labiche to Lubitsch, gave way to anthologies of slapstick punctuated by expletives. The story became so much dead air between explosions of pain and laughter. And so the question arises: Does anyone in movies still care about structure...
...week before "the age of taxes, accountants, business managers and tax shelters [when] the make-it-and-spend-it philosophy ruled the town." He discovered the "It" girl, Clara Bow, and the German character lead Emil Jannings; he promoted the careers of people as diverse as Director Ernst Lubitsch and the Marx brothers. Yet, by his mid-40s he had flamed out. His son began in movies by collaborating with an alcoholic writer named F. Scott Fitzgerald (whom he later commemorated in the novel The Disenchanted) and wrote several film classics, including On the Waterfront and A Face...
...dramatic situations, mise-en-scene, dialogue and acting. Like Chaplin (in A Woman of Paris ), Allen, too, decided not to participate as an actor in Interiors, a decision which permitted him to concentrate on directing the film. In a further parallel, while Chaplin appropriated certain stylistic features of the "Lubitsch Touch," Allen conceived his film as an homage to Ingmar Bergman and his "cinematic thinking...