Volume 31, Number 2 · February 16, 1984
Touching Lubitsch
By Rhoda Koenig
Three Screen Comedies
by Samson Raphaelson, with an introduction by Pauline Kael
University of Wisconsin Press, 392 pp., $19.95
Ernst Lubitsch's American Comedy
by William Paul
Columbia University Press,, 359 pp., $24.95
To Be or Not to Be
directed by Alan Johnson, produced by Mel Brooks, screenplay by Thomas Meehan, by Ronny Graham
Ernst Lubitsch was the most American of European directors—and the most European of American ones. Like so many Hollywood tycoons, Lubitsch saw the movies as a good opportunity to make money. Like the European film makers, he saw them as an art form and, though he did not write scripts, was distinctive and dominating enough to deserve the title of auteur. (Samson Raphaelson, the scenarist of most of Lubitsch's best films, said that he 'roused [writers] to outdo themselves, and at the same time contributed on every level and in ways that I cannot measure or define.')[1]
Review, 3342 words
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