Die Puppe (1919) - film review

Lancelot is a sensitive young man who enjoys the carefree life of a bachelor.  Imagine then his undiluted horror when he is summoned to his uncle, the wealthy Baron of Chanterelle, and told that he must marry in order to preserve the family line.  Forty eligible brides are assembled, all eager to tie the connubial knot with the man who is soon to inherit a fortune, but Lancelot would rather die a hundred deaths than get married once.  Pursued by his uncle’s household and a battalion of prospective brides, the reluctant bridegroom flees from his hometown and takes sanctuary in an abbey.  As it happens, the abbot and his brethren are facing something of a cash flow crisis and so they are naturally interested when they learn that the Baron intends to give his nephew a large dowry on the day of his marriage.  The abbot suggests that Lancelot should visit Hilarius, an inventor who has created full-size dolls that are almost indistinguishable from human beings.  All that Lancelot has to do is to buy one of the dolls, marry it, collect his dowry, pay the abbot his commission, and everyone can live happily ever after.  As luck would have it, Hilarius has created the perfect doll for Lancelot’s purpose, an exact replica of his daughter Ossi.   Unfortunately, just before Lancelot comes to collect the doll, Hilarius’s precocious boy apprentice damages it in the course of burning up some pent-up adolescent lust.  Ossi takes pity on the boy and agrees to substitute herself for the doll, not knowing that Lancelot intends to take it away immediately so that he can marry it.  The scheme works better than Lancelot could have imagined - at least it does so until he finds that his doll has a mind of its own...

It is testament to Ernst Lubitsch’s genius that his least naturalistic, most fantastic film is one of his most accessible and entertaining, a scurrilous social satire and sex comedy dressed up as a whimsical child’s fairytale.   With its extremely artificial sets and characters that look as if they were dreamed up by Hans Christian Andersen, Die Puppe provides one of the most unusual examples of expressionism in German cinema.  Whilst other filmmakers, notably Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, would use expressionistic devices to exteriorise the inner moods and feelings of the protagonists and thereby achieve a heightened sense of emotional realism, here Lubitsch employs similar techniques to inflate the artificiality of the story and the characters, for purely comical effect. 

The director makes it clear that we are entering a fantasy world at the start of the film, where he is seen putting together a model set and populating it with dolls.  It’s all make-believe, Lubitsch appears to be telling us, none of it is real.  But how quickly do we forget this.  Despite the absurdly unreal sets and O.T.T. performances, we soon allow the illusion of the filmmaker’s art to seduce us and convince us that what we are seeing on the screen in front of us is reality.  Lubitsch was one of first filmmakers to realise the extent to which audiences could be beguiled and manipulated by the moving picture and here he is testing the limits of our gullibility to the limit.

Die Puppe certainly is not the subtlest of Lubitsch’s comedies, but it is the one that is most likely to give you a coronary from excessive laughter.  You could easily mistake Mack Sennett as the guiding hand behind some of the film’s madcap comedy sequences, for example the one in which the hero is chased around town by two score would-be brides, something that looks uncannily like an inverted Benny Hill sketch.  The visual gags are some of the best outside a Buster Keaton film – just who could resist laughing out loud at the ludicrous "hair-raising" joke?

It is the cheeky double entendres that provide the best value for money – hardly surprising given that the plot revolves around a confirmed bachelor and his sex doll.  You wouldn’t find jokes like these in Hollywood, not even in the pre-censorship days.  "Don’t forget to oil her twice a week", our hero is told just before he whisks his doll off to the wedding ceremony.  Later our intrepid groom quips, when asked if he knows what to do on his wedding night, "It’s okay, I have the instruction manual."   This is Carry On humour, Lubitsch-style.  The filthier your mind, the funnier the film.  I probably didn’t get the best jokes.  Die Puppe is outrageous – quite possibly the funniest German film you will ever see.

© Chris Alderton 2010

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