The Oyster Princess and The Doll remain landmark achievements in Lubitsch's career, each a unique and dazzlingly feat of cinematic style. These zany films, starring the irrepressibly madcap Ossi Oswalda in very different roles (in The Doll, she is a dollmaker's daughter who masquerades as a mechanical sex toy) show Lubitsch's already-advanced sense of cinematic style, drawing on the surrealist and expressionist movements that were then so influential in Europe.
Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It?
The sources of The Doll are two stories by E.T.A. Hoffman from the early nineteenth century, Der Sandman and Die Puppa, that were used in Offenbach's opera Tales of Hoffman as well as being the source of the ballet Coppelia. Lubitsch packs a great deal into this movie, which runs for just over an hour and begins with Lubitsch himself building a minature set. In the story Lancelot (Hermann Thimig) is promised his uncle's inheritance if he marries quickly and when word gets out he is chased by dozens of women (this obviously influenced Keaton's Seven Chances of 1925, where the same thing happens) until he escapes to a monastery full of greedy monks, who suggest he go to see a puppet maker named Hilarius (Victor Janson) who will make a puppet for him that he can then marry and then give the inheritance to the monks. But Hilarius's apprentice breaks the doll Hilarius had made and because the doll looks exactly like Hilarius's daughter (Ossi Oswalda) she takes the doll's place and Lancelot buys and marries her without realizing she is not a doll; Oswalda pretends to be a doll while acting like a woman when Lancelot is not looking. Lubitsch includes numerous fanciful sets as he progresses from Hilarius's workshop, where the numerous dolls Hilarius had made obey his orders to dance, to the monastery where Lancelot and Ossi sleep in a spartan cell and Lancelot discovers his doll is a real woman.
No comments:
Post a Comment