Film Review
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.
© James Travers 2010
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Ernst Lubitsch film:
Die Puppe (1919)
Film Synopsis
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.