January 7: The Oyster Princess/Die Austernprinzessin (1919 -- Ernst Lubitsch)

★★★

Lubitsch might have been too busy in 1919 to put equal effort into all his film projects because the humor in this one doesn’t quite get to the level of that in The Doll.  The film is funny, but the humor here is more broad than that of The Doll and relies on exaggerated gestures and ridiculous situations more than the deft stokes we see in the other film.

Of course, it’s Lubitsch, so there are some points worth thinking about in The Oyster Princess.  For one, I liked the parody of the American industrialist, or in this case, oyster magnate.  Quaker is an oversized guy with long sideburns who is unable to light his own cigar, comb his own hair or even turn over in bed.  He’s surrounded by a coterie of black servants dressed in colonial jackets to perform all such actions for him.  His daughter, Ossie, is a spoiled, petulant brat who breaks and tears things up when she doesn’t get her every whim met.  She and her father have nothing but money and believe they can get anything they want with their money, including a European prince.  It’s an interesting perspective on how Europeans might have viewed the Americans flooding Europe in 1919 after the war.  Lubitsch also parodies the American love of big here:  the Americans live in a gigantic palace that requires a large map, they have giant dinners with massive quantities of food, and the guests are waited on by giant numbers of servants.  Even Quaker and his Ossie have a large number of servants who follow them around.  The Europeans, meanwhile, are threadbare and have a hard life, as we witness when the Prince borrows some money for a night on the town but finds his money nicked by his friends bit by bit.

I also enjoyed the large-scale, spectacle choreography here, a practice that Busby Berkley would take to its apotheosis in the 30s.  Ossie’s bath sequence is a precursor to an Ethel Merman performance, and the delirious foxtrot interlude clearly points to what the Gold Diggers will be up to in 1933.  Even the foodservice for the wedding banquet is a large-scale performance number aided by its rhythmic editing, and we witness a mass, women's boxing match that is choreographed right down to the fighters' departure.

Oyster Princess doesn’t win by its use of the Lubitsch touch.  This is a broader, exaggerated humor that shows Lubitsch can use different, if less effective comic devices.  It’s a funny film, but these are jokes we can see in other movies.