SEX, POLITICS, AND COMEDY GERMAN JEWISH CULTURES Editorial Board: Matthew Handelman, Michigan State University Iris Idelson-Shein, Goethe Universitat Frankfurt am Main Samuel Spinner, Johns Hopkins University Joshua Teplitsky, Stony Brook University Kerry Wallach, Gettysburg College Sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute London SEX, POLITICS, AND COMEDY The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch Rick McCormick Indiana University Press This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu Supported by the Axel Springer Stiftung This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the University of Minnesota. Learn more at the TOME website, which can be found at the following web address: openmonographs.org. © 2020 by Richard W. McCormick All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-253-04833-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-253-04834-9 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-253-04836-3 (ebook) 1 2 3 4 5 25 24 23 22 21 20 For Amaya, Killian, Macie, and Emilia CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Transnational Jewish Comedy 1 I Berlin: Sex, Spectacle, and Anarchy 1 From the Jewish “Bad Boy” to the “Bad Girl”: Early Comedies, 1914–18 33 2 Bad Girls in the Costume Epics, 1919–22 75 3 Bad Girls Untamed: Anarchic/Fantastic Comedies, 1919–22 106 II Hollywood: From European Sophistication to Antifascist Screwball 4 Sex and Sophistication: Comedies and Operettas, 1923–34 151 5 Pushing the Boundaries in Pre-Code Hollywood, 1931–34 203 6 Screwball Politics: American Populism and European Politics, 1935–41 244 viii | Contents 7 Coming Out as Jewish: To Be or Not to Be, 1942 282 Epilogue: Twilight of a Cosmopolitan, 1943–47 308 Bibliography 319 Filmography 335 Index 343 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS n the long process of writing this book, many people and insti- Itutions provided important assistance, and I want to acknowledge and thank them. The following scholars provided important feedback and sup- port at various points in the writing of this book: Leslie Morris, Jay Geller, Ofer Ashknenazi, Valerie Weinstein, Barbara Hales, Mihaela Petrescu, Christian Rogowski, Nancy Nenno, Susanne Baakmann, Alison Guenther- Pal, Ruth-Ellen Joeres, Monika Žagar, Christina Gerhardt, and Stefan Hoff- mann at the Enzyklopaedie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur (Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture). Rembert Hüser and Raysh Weiss shared their work on Lubitsch with me as well as DVDs and VHS tapes. For her groundbreaking book on Lubitsch, I want to thank Sabine Hake; others whose work on Lubitsch, on exile and émigré cinema, and on German Jewish concerns in Weimar cinema and culture was of tremendous help include Valerie Weinstein, Gerd Gemünden, Ofer Ashkenazi, Kerry Wallach, Noah Isenberg, Darcy Buerkle, and Cynthia Walk. For his exper- tise on Weimar and German cinema, I thank Tony Kaes, who has been an intellectual example and a mentor not only to me but to generations of scholars working in German and film studies. I also want to thank Eric Rentschler and Johannes von Moltke as well as Tony Kaes for their orga- nization of the German Film Institute on “Lost Weimar,” where I was first able to see Lubitsch’s Sumurun. A number of film archives and libraries in Germany and the United States generously and frequently allowed me to do essential research for this book: I thank the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, especially Julia Riedel and Peter Latta in the photo archive, Regina Hoffmann and Lisa Roth in the Schriftgutarchiv (archive of written materials), Cordula Döhrer in the library, and Anke Hahn in the film archive. Thanks also to Hans Helmut Prinzler, the former director of the Kinemathek, who graciously allowed me to photocopy whatever I liked from his own file on Lubitsch. In Berlin I also worked and viewed films at the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, where Carola Okrug was helpful. In Wiesbaden I watched films at the film archive of the Deutsches Filminstitut, and I thank Michael Schurig for his help there. I also watched films a number of times at the Film Museum in ix x | Acknowledgments Munich, and I thank Stefan Droessler for his permission to do that. The Murnau-Stiftung in Wiesbaden provided one of the images in the book, and I want to thank Marcel Steinlein there for his help with that. In California I often worked at the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills; over the years, Jenny Romero, Louise Hilton, and Faye Thompson were very helpful. I also worked at the University of Southern California: I want to thank especially Michaela Ullmann for her help at the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, Ned Comstock at the Cinematic Arts Library, and Jonathon Auxier at the Warner Brothers Archive; Paul Lerner also provided helpful information. I watched films a number of times at the Film and Television Archive of the University of California at Los Angeles, and I want to thank the director there, Jan-Christopher Horak, for meet- ing with me and generously providing me with a copy of his master’s thesis on Lubitsch. In New York I worked at the Museum of Modern Art in the library and in the Film Study Center, where I also watched films; I am grate- ful to Ashley Swinnerton and Jennifer Tobias for their help there. At the University of Minnesota, I am grateful to the Imagine Fund for a number of grants that have covered travel, research costs, and manuscript preparation and to the College of Liberal Arts for two administrative leaves and for its support of research assistants. I also want to thank the Center of Jewish Studies and its then director, Leslie Morris, for offering me some of the first venues where I could present my research on Lubitsch, and I thank Helga Thorson for the opportunity to present an early version of my research as a Landsdowne Lecture at the University of Victoria, Canada. I am grateful to my home department, the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic, and Dutch, and its chair, Charlotte Melin, for support of my research and teaching over the years. I thank also the Deutscher Akadamischer Aus- tauschdienst (DAAD, or German Academic Exchange Service) for a Study Visit Research Grant that funded one of my trips to Germany. I want to thank film director Robert Fischer both for his film Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin (2006) and for information he provided me. I am very grateful to my friend Tom Knoff for his assistance with the photographs used in this book. I want to thank Ann Klefstad for the copyediting she did for me in summer 2017. Three undergraduate research assistants provided significant help on this book: Braxton Haake, Maddy Folstein, and Coby Oertel. I had two graduate research assistants, Jana Gierden and Moritz Meutzner, both of whom provided important feedback. Moritz’s work Acknowledgments | xi editing the final manuscript and creating the index was invaluable. I also want to thank Leigh McLennon at Amnet for copyediting. An earlier version of the section in chapter 2 on Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry was published as “Sex, History, and Upward Mobility: Ernst Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry/Passion, 1919” in German Studies Review 33, no. 3 (October 2010): 603–17. It appears in revised form with permission from Johns Hopkins University Press. An earlier version of the section in chapter 2 on Sumurun was published as “Desire vs. Despotism: The Poli- tics of Sumurun (1920), Ernst Lubitsch’s ‘Oriental’ Fantasy,” in The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering Germany’s Filmic Legacy, edited by Christian Rogowski (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 67–83. I thank Camden House and Boydell and Brewer, Inc., for permission to use it. An earlier version of the section on Ninotchka in chapter 6 was pub- lished as “Romantic Comedy and the Hitler-Stalin Pact: Billy Wilder and Ninotchka (USA 1939)” in Hebrew translation in SLIL—Online Journal for History, Film, and Television, no. 6 (Winter 2012): 21–40. I thank Ofer Ashkenazi, the editor of SLIL, for permission to use it. Parts of chapter 6 also appeared in earlier form in my article “Screwball” (with a focus on Lubitsch) in the Enzyklopaedie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, edited by Dan Diner, vol. 5 (Stuttgart, Germany: Metzler, 2014), 402–6. I thank J. B. Metzler for permission to use it. A section in chapter 4 appeared in an earlier version as “Ernst Lubitsch and the Transnational Twenties: The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg” in Transit: A Journal of Travel, Migration, and Multiculturalism in the German- Speaking World 10, no. 2 (2016), http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6t02590p. I thank Transit for permission to use it. A section of chapter 5 appeared in an earlier version as “A Serious Man? Lubitsch’s Anti-War Film The Man I Killed (a.k.a Broken Lullaby, USA 1932)” in Continuity and Crisis in German Cinema, 1928–1936, edited by Barbara Hales, Mihaela Petrescu, and Valerie Weinstein (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016), 291–305. I thank Camden House and Boydell and Brewer for permission to use it.