Kohlhiesels Töchter (1920) - film review

Bavarian innkeeper Mathias Kohlhiesel has two daughters who could not be more different.  Whereas Gretl is attractive, good-natured and cheerful, her sister Liesel is dowdy, irritable and moody.  Peter Xaver is in love with Gretl, but her father will not allow her to marry until Liesel has been taken off his hands.  Peter’s quick-thinking friend Paul comes up with the perfect solution.  Peter will first marry Liesel, knowing that she will soon want to divorce him, and he can then marry her sister.  The seemingly foolproof plan soon goes awry when Paul falls in love with Gretl...

Taking as his inspiration a certain play by William Shakespeare (The Taming of the Shrew), Ernst Lubitsch delivers one of his most joyfully unbridled comedies in Kohlhiesels Töchter.  The film was a major hit for Lubtsch and stars two notable screen actors of German silent cinema, Henny Porten and Emil Jannings, who would both subsequently feature in Lubitsch’s grand historical epic Anna Boleyn (1920).  Porten gives great value in the dual role of the two unlike sisters, delineating the characters by their behaviour rather than their appearance, although Jannings pretty well steals the show with his larger than life screen persona and penchant for ripping up the set (literally in this case).

By the time he made this film, Lubitsch had already established himself as one of Germany’s leading filmmakers and was moving away from this kind of frenetic unsophisticated comedy towards more ambitious historical productions.   Kohlhiesels Töchter is a throwback to the director’s early sex comedies, such as Ich möchte kein Mann sein (1918), a riotous send-up of marriage etiquette and the old-fashioned romantic melodrama.  Shakespeare should be credited with the basic premise but Lubitsch extracts considerably more humour, and a fair amount of pathos, from the situation.  This film illustrates not only Lubitsch’s talent for storytelling via the medium of film but also his innate flair for visual comedy.  This is easily one of his most deliriously funny films.

© James Travers 2010

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