Ernst Lubitsch, the director whose masterpiece was banned for thirty-three years

Ernst Lubitsch

Photo: Unknown (George Grantham Bain collection) / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 29, 1892 Berlin, Germany
Died	November 30, 1947 (55)
Occupation	Film Director
Known for	The Shop Around the Corner, To Be or Not to Be, Ninotchka
Awards	Academy Award · Nominated Best Director: The Patriot (1929) · Nominated Best Director: The Love Parade (1930) · Nominated Best Director: Heaven Can Wait (1943)

Nobody who watched a closed door laughed like Ernst Lubitsch. For a director whose career spanned silent-era Berlin to the wartime Hollywood of Jack Benny and Greta Garbo, his greatest technical invention was the cut away. Show the couple entering the hotel room. Cut to the lobby. Cut to a flower wilting in a vase. The audience understood; the censor, if watching closely enough, couldn’t prove anything.

The technique — universally known as the “Lubitsch Touch,” a phrase coined by Warner Bros. publicist Hal Wallis in the 1920s — was actually a philosophy of compression. Billy Wilder, who co-wrote Ninotchka with him and credited Lubitsch as the formative influence on his own career, described it as “the Superjoke — the joke you didn’t expect.” Film historian Ephraim Katz defined it more formally as the art of condensing “the meaning of an entire film into a single shot or brief scene that provided an ironic key to the characters.”

Lubitsch was born on January 29, 1892, in Berlin, the son of a Jewish tailor from Grodno. He left school at sixteen to work in his father’s clothing shop by day and perform at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater by night. By 1912 he was appearing in silent films at Berlin’s Bioscope studios; by 1914 he was directing them. His early German comedies — The Oyster Princess (1919) and I Don’t Want to Be a Man (1918), both starring the brilliantly physical Ossi Oswalda — established his gift for using satire to explore social and sexual conventions that couldn’t be addressed plainly. His historical epics, particularly Madame Dubarry (1919) starring Pola Negri, became the first German films to penetrate the American market after the First World War.

He arrived in Hollywood in late 1921 and never left. His first years there produced a quiet shift in romantic comedy: The Marriage Circle (1924), Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925), The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927). When sound arrived, he adapted faster than almost anyone, transforming the musical into a form where songs advanced character rather than just interrupting the story. The Love Parade (1929), his first sound film, with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, earned his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director.

The peak of his achievement came in the brief window before the Hays Code’s strict enforcement. Trouble in Paradise (1932), co-written with his most frequent collaborator Samson Raphaelson and built around two jewel thieves who seduce each other and a wealthy widow simultaneously, operated with what critic Dwight Macdonald called “close to perfection.” Its opening shot — a gondolier who turns out to be emptying the garbage — announced that this was a film about elegant deceit, and everything that followed delivered on that promise. Design for Living (1933), from a Ben Hecht script adapting Noël Coward’s play, starred Gary Cooper, Fredric March, and Miriam Hopkins in an arrangement the Code would have found deeply objectionable — which was precisely the point.

In 1935, the Production Code administration withdrew Trouble in Paradise from US circulation. It would not be seen again in the United States for thirty-three years. This fact, largely forgotten in discussions of the Lubitsch canon, matters enormously: the generation that formed the dominant critical consensus about his work knew primarily the post-Code films. The bolder thing had been removed from the equation before it could be properly measured.

The post-Code Lubitsch is sometimes framed as a lesser figure working under constraint. The evidence does not support this reading cleanly. Ninotchka (1939) — advertised by MGM as the film where “Garbo Laughs!” — let him use the contrast between Soviet austerity and Parisian ease as a mechanism for one of cinema’s most precisely timed romantic comedies. The Shop Around the Corner (1940), which Lubitsch named as his personal favorite of all his films, compressed the entire emotional register of romantic longing into a dry-goods store staffed by two Budapest pen-pal correspondents who despised each other in person. James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan played it with a restraint that, under most directors, would have felt like absence. Under Lubitsch it felt like everything.

To Be or Not to Be (1942) remains the most argued-over film in his catalog. Released eight weeks after the death of its star Carole Lombard in a plane crash, and set against the Nazi occupation of Poland whose theater company it depicts, the film drew divided contemporary responses. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther called it “callous.” Lubitsch replied in print: he had not made a comedy about war; he had made a film about the fraudulence of self-presentation, whether that self was an actor’s ego or a totalitarian ideology. The film holds a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was preserved by the Library of Congress in 1996. The controversy has outlasted the consensus against it by several decades.

His health declined sharply after a major heart attack in 1943. He received an Honorary Academy Award on March 13, 1947, with presenter Mervyn LeRoy calling him “a master of innuendo with an adult mind and a hatred of saying things the obvious way.” On November 30, 1947, while beginning production on That Lady in Ermine, his heart gave out for the sixth time. He was fifty-five. Otto Preminger, who had already completed one unfinished Lubitsch production, finished the film again.

Billy Wilder, speaking at the funeral, said: “Worse than that — no more Lubitsch pictures.” Thirty-three years later, when Trouble in Paradise finally returned to theaters, audiences found that the film had lost none of its implication. The closed door still held everything. A Film Forum retrospective in New York ran his work through the summer of 2026; a new Criterion Blu-ray arrived in April. The argument about what exactly the Lubitsch Touch was continues, which is precisely the condition he would have preferred.

Featured Films

Tags: Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, Greta Garbo, Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, To Be or Not to Be

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