In a letter to the historian Herman G. Weinberg from the mid-forties, the director Ernst Lubitsch called his 1919 film, “The Oyster Princess,” (which I discuss in this clip) “my first comedy which showed something of a definite style.” Lubitsch made it at the age of twenty-seven; he was an established actor and had turned to directing in 1914; and, judging from his letter, he was clearly as adept at verbal understatement as at visual subtlety.
“The Oyster Princess” exudes a definite style from virtually every frame; it’s a comic extravagance that casts its tendencies through to the end of Lubitsch’s abbreviated career (his last completed feature was “Cluny Brown,” from 1946)—the shimmering erotic nuance, the tight and quasi-martial order that keeps high-society effervescence under pressure, the hints and cues that tip revellers off to appear or disappear at the right moment. In silent films, he evokes this off-screen space by means of sound. I’ve written in the magazine about his 1923 feature, “The Marriage Circle” (his American début), a primordial drawing-room comedy in which the panoply of characters’ reactions to noises off (which he implies in images) suggests a society held as taut by sexual desire as violin strings. In “The Oyster Princess,” the method is both more blatant and more fleshy: the squeaky wheel is an American potentate’s daughter, played by Ossi Oswalda (a big German star at the time, whom Lubitsch had discovered), who gives vent to her nubile lust as clangorously as possible and leaves no doubt of its destructive power.
