Lubitsch's Only “Expressionistic” Venture Features a Favorite Actress

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Lubitsch’s only “Expressionistic” venture features a favorite actress, Pola Negri, as the temperamental daughter of a brigand chief having it out withthe local endarmie. Highly stylized acting, bizarre set designs, and ananti-militaristic tone doomed The Mountain Cat to commercial failure and so it was never released in the U.S. Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, and Kay Francis Lubitsch’s first feature-length satire, the genre star as a pair of swindler-lovers and their wealthy that made him famous, examines an American victim in what became Lubitsch’s favorite film. “dollar princess” and her millionaire “oyster king” A classic pre-Code Depression-era meditation on father, who invade an old aristocratic Prussian the vagaries of wealth and morality that was family in an attempt to buy a title for the withdrawn in 1935 and not shown again in the daughter via fortuitous marriage. U.S. again until 1968. Another Lubitsch ménage a trois, this one with Fredric March and Gary Cooper as impoverished Americans in Paris who fall in love with another Charming, graceful period comedy about would-be artist, played by Miriam Hopkins. An co-workers in a Budapest notions shop who don’t interesting experiment by the director in using realize they are lonelyhearts penpals. Stars Jimmy writer Ben Hecht to turn Noel Coward’s play Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, and Frank Morgan as of bourgeoisie mannerisms into one of the shopowner Hugo Matuschek, with a marvelous exuberant non-conformity. screenplay by frequent Lubitsch collaborator Samson Raphaelson. Scripted by Lubitsch, Walter Reisch, Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, this good- humored satire on Communists versus Capitalists was promoted by MGM as the film in which “Garbo laughs.” She plays a Russian comrade sent to fetch three fellow commissars who are in Paris to sell jewels to raise money for the state..

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