How Did Lubitsch Do It? by Joseph McBride

Lubitsch was the last of the genuine continentals let loose on the American continent, and we shall never see his like again because the world he had celebrated died -- even before he did -- everywhere except in his own memory.
--Andrew Sarris

Lubitsch became Hollywood's most acute commentator on sexual mores, countering American puritanical hypocrisy with European sophistication and making his adopting countrymen enjoy it.  
--Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It? (Columbia University Press, 2018).

McBride has seen every Lubitsch movie that still exists (some of the silent films are gone) and read everything on the man in every language.  Yet he still can't answer his own question, even if it were completely clear what the antecedent of "it" is.  McBride is constantly using imprecise adjectives such as ineffable, elliptical, subtle and oblique to describe Lubitsch and his films,  words that are even more subjective than "funny."  As is sometimes the case with books about film, especially comedies, reading about Lubitsch's films if one hasn't seen them is dubious in multiple ways:  if one has seen them and liked them the book has little value and if one has seen them and not liked them McBride's book has little point.

Lubitsch's style and humor are indeed too subtle for most modern viewers. When I first started going to movies I was very much under the spell of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane and even walked out on Lubitsch's brilliant Design for Living (1933), which like all dazzling comedies requires the viewer to meet it halfway.  For those of us who already are in thrall to Lubitsch, McBride has some useful and interesting analyses about Lubitsch's filmmaking, including his fights with the censors and the reasons he gave up making musicals after the production code went into effect: no more joking about adultery!  For me watching Lubitsch's films is rather akin to reading Trollope, Dickens and George Eliot:  the immersion into another time and another world that is more relevant then ever. Several of Lubitsch's best films are shown on Turner Classic Movies:  Design for Living, Ninotchka (1939), Trouble in Paradise (1933), The Shop Around the Corner (1940).  If you like their brilliant and subtle direction I recommend Sarris's essay on Lubitsch in The American Cinema:  Directors and Directions 1929-1968 before reading McBride's book.