Die Austernprinzessin (1919) - film review

Mr Quaker is America’s Oyster King, a millionaire businessman whose seafood empire is unsurpassed.  But his daughter Ossi is unimpressed by his status and spends most of her time wrecking his house in her frequent temper tantrums.  The cause of Ossi’s latest upset is news that a shoe cream magnate has married his daughter off to a count.  Mr Quaker placates his daughter by telling her that he will go out and find a prince for her to marry.  Without a moment’s delay, the Oyster King contacts a professional matchmaker, who suggests that Prince Nucki, an impoverished Prussian aristocrat, would make an ideal husband.  Nucki is reluctant to marry and asks his only remaining servant, Josef, to pay a call on the Quaker household to assess whether Ossi would make a suitable bride.  During his visit, Josef is mistaken for the prince, but before he knows what is happening, Ossi has dragged him off to get married.  On the night after this hasty wedding, Ossi refuses to share her room with her new husband and instead occupies herself with an association which cares for dipsomaniacs.  Little does Ossi know that one of the drunken men in her charge is Prince Nucki, the man she is unwittingly married to in name...

By the time Ernst Lubitsch came to direct The Oyster Princess, the best known of his silent films, he had established himself as one of Germany’s leading filmmakers.  This film marked the end of the first stage of Lubitsch’s career, completing a series of frenetic short comedies featuring the popular German actress Ossi Oswalda and paving the way for the sophisticated full-length comedies which the director would go on to make in Hollywood.  His next film Madame Du Barry (1919) would be his first major international success, one in a series of lavish historical dramas which would dominate the last phase of his period in Germany.

In common with many of Lubitsch’s previous silent comedies, The Oyster Princess is a  bawdy satire on the sexual and cultural mores of its time, with a tangled web of deception and misunderstanding fuelling the chaotic plot.  Once again, Ossi Oswalda proves to be the perfect instrument for the director’s unbridled humour, which manages to combine subtle adult comedy (including word play and double entendre) with bold visual gags that often seem juvenile.  Looking suspiciously like a graduate of St Trinian’s, Ossi is actually quite terrifying in this film, ransacking the family mansion to get her way one moment and then doing unspeakable things to a baby doll in the course of an ante-natal lesson.  You can’t help wondering what kind of future Prince Nucki has in store for him once the honeymoon is over.  A film with a happy ending?  I don’t think so.

The film’s set-pieces are amongst the most ambitious that Lubitsch had so far attempted.  These include the wedding breakfast sequence in which an army of servants tend to a party of wedding guests (the servant to guest ratio being at least ten), looking like factory workers on an assembly line or automata in some grotesque ornate mechanism.  This brings to mind similar sequences in René Clair’s À nous la liberté (1931) and Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), and serves a similar purpose.  Lubitsch is mocking the soulless mechanisation that has apparently resulted from unfettered American capitalism, a modern bane that has robbed men and women of their individuality and reduced them to the level of unthinking zombies.  The ambitious dance sequence that follows, slyly described as an epidemic of foxtrot, makes the same point, with the wedding guests themselves transformed into mindless automata by the need to conform.  There’s an irony in the fact that within five years of making this film Lubitsch would himself become a cog in one vast industrial machine, that machine being the Hollywood filmmaking system.

© Chris Alderton 2010

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