Choose Expedited Shipping at checkout for delivery by Tuesday, July 20
English0231186452
22.0
In Stock
Overview
Orson Welles called Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947) “a giant” whose “talent and originality are stupefying.” Jean Renoir said, “He invented the modern Hollywood.” Celebrated for his distinct style and credited with inventing the classic genre of the Hollywood romantic comedy and helping to create the musical, Lubitsch won the admiration of his fellow directors, including Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder, whose office featured a sign on the wall asking, “How would Lubitsch do it?” Despite the high esteem in which Lubitsch is held, as well as his unique status as a leading filmmaker in both Germany and the United States, today he seldom receives the critical attention accorded other major directors of his era.
How Did Lubitsch Do It? restores Lubitsch to his former stature in the world of cinema. Joseph McBride analyzes Lubitsch’s films in rich detail in the first in-depth critical study to consider the full scope of his work and its evolution in both his native and adopted lands. McBride explains the “Lubitsch Touch” and shows how the director challenged American attitudes toward romance and sex. Expressed obliquely, through sly innuendo, Lubitsch’s risqué, sophisticated, continental humor engaged the viewer’s intelligence while circumventing the strictures of censorship in such masterworks as The Marriage Circle, Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living, Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, and To Be or Not to Be. McBride’s analysis of these films brings to life Lubitsch’s wit and inventiveness and offers revealing insights into his working methods.
Joseph McBride is a film historian and professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He is the author of many books, including three critical studies of Orson Welles; Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (1992); Steven Spielberg: A Biography (1997); Searching for John Ford (2001); and Frankly: Unmasking Frank Capra (2019).
Table of Contents
Introduction: “How Did Lubitsch Do It?” 1. “Herr Ernst Lubitsch” 2. “Who Is Ernst Lubitsch?” 3. The “Berlin Style” in Hollywood 4. Tin Cans in a Warehouse? 5. “Give Me a Moment, Please” 6. “In Times Like These . . .” 7. Master of the Ineffable 8. The Aging Master 9. The Door Closes Epilogue: The Importance of Being Ernst Acknowledgments and Influences Filmography Notes on Sources Index
Founded in 1676 during a cosmopolitan early modern period, Mindröling monastery became a key site
for Buddhist education and a Tibetan civilizational center. Its founders sought to systematize and institutionalize a worldview rooted in Buddhist philosophy, engaging with contemporaries from ...
Alasdair Cochrane introduces an entirely new theory of animal rights grounded in their interests as
sentient beings. He then applies this theory to different and underexplored policy areas, such as genetic engineering, pet-keeping, indigenous hunting, and religious slaughter. In contrast ...
How will patterns of human interaction with the earth's eco-system impact on biodiversity loss over
the long term—not in the next ten or even fifty years, but on the vast temporal scale be dealt with by earth scientists? This volume ...
Hegel is making a comeback. After the decline of the Marxist Hegelianism that dominated the
twentieth century, leading thinkers are rediscovering Hegel’s thought as a resource for contemporary politics. What does a notoriously difficult nineteenth-century German philosopher have to offer ...
In a bucolic idyll, a terrorist agonizes over the act of violence he is about
to commit. On a remote island in the South Pacific, the investigation of a case of mass suicide reveals further mysteries. In a far-flung colony, ...
Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's
literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and ...
How should we evaluate the success of each person's life? Countering the prevalent philosophical perspective
on the subject, Steven M. Cahn and Christine Vitrano defend the view that our well-being is dependent not on particular activities, accomplishments, or awards but ...
Examines 2 different and often opposing worlds of in vitro fertilization: the public's political, legal
and ethical concerns surrounding the technique, and the personal, pragmatic world of the individual patients who come to the centers seeding a cure for infertility. ...
