Ernst Lubitsch's American Comedy

by William Paul

Analyzes the style and social themes of the comic films made in Hollywood by the director, Ernst Lubitsch

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

367 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1983

About the author

Prof. William Paul (Ph.D., Columbia University) was the founding director of Film and Media Studies. He has specialized in writing about film genres, most especially comedy, and film spectatorship. He is the author of When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition and the Evolution of American Film (2016), Laughing/Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (1995) Ernst Lubitsch’s American Comedy (1983), all from Columbia University Press. He is currently working on a new book about contemporary romantic comedy. In an earlier life, he was a movie reviewer for Rolling Stone, where he reviewed Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy as well as Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex, among other films, as well as a reviewer and feature article writer for The Village Voice, where he provided a report on the Lincoln Center gala honoring Alfred Hitchcock, a two-part article on the first showings of hard-core pornography in New York theaters, a consideration of André Bazin’s aesthetics in relation to contemporary documentary filmmaking, and a three-part career survey of classical Hollywood director Raoul Walsh, among other pieces. Since then his writing on film genres, technology and movie theaters has appeared in academic journals and anthologies on film comedy, horror film and film exhibition. He has also provided a video essay for the Criterion Collection disc of Design for Living.

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exhaustive (& occasionally exhausting) analysis of some of Lubitsch's greatest work. Key to the book is the idea of putting the director's films in the context not only of their time, but also into that of other work coming out of Hollywood contemporaneously. This adds a huge dimension to Paul's observations & conclusions that others tend to miss, looking at Lubitsch & his movies as in a void, so strange & singular are they. The author's insights are keen & at times achieve a beauty all their own. But I wish he didn't feel the need to denigrate his fellow critics & their takes on the same material (particularly poor Leland Poague) so often. Any serious book on Lubitsch is worth reading, & this one, tho dense & at times problematic for me, is ridiculously thorough & has some rich rewards that make it uniquely worthwhile.