Die Puppe

This comedy from the hands of Ernst Lubitsch in 1919 is a joyride through a number of imaginative sets and situations. Even though its artificiality if ever apparent, the movie makes it work by playing with the costumes and sets, to create a whimsical world where everything can happen.

Like other Lubitsch films the plot of this is build upon similar themes such as facade and identity. Although not my favourite of Lubitsch's films it hold a place in the top five. This movie is assured to put a smile on your face the whole way through, driven by Lubitsch's at times expressive directing.

"Die Puppe" aka "The Doll" ranks with "The Oyster Princess" as perhaps Lubitsch's most sublime film made during his German period. Both films are superior in many respects to the well-known but pallid historical drama, "Madame duBarry" aka "Passion" (also made in 1919). Lubitsch himself felt that way. In a letter he once submitted to his biographer Herman G. Weinberg, Lubitsch considered "Die Puppe" and "Oyster Princess" as his most outstanding comedies produced in Germany before he departed for Hollywood to make "Rosita".

An early, entrancing example of what Lubitsch would become years later, "Die Puppe" is a supremely funny and delightful silent burlesque, filled with the master's light, witty, and graceful touch. The setting is frothy and artificial and it anticipates Lubitsch's enchanting fairy tale musicals of the sound era.

"Die Puppe" is introduced by Lubitsch himself with an artificial cardboard. It is a fairy tale about of a young prince named Lancelot(Hermann Thimig) who flees from his uncle Baron von Chanterelle(Max Kronert) to avoid a marriage. He settles in a monastery. There, he meets several monks who persuade him to marry a human-like mechanical doll and give them his uncle's dowry. The doll-maker Hilarius (Victor Janson) agrees to Lancelot's interest in his newest doll, an exact replica of Hilarius' daughter Ossi (played by Ossi Oswalda herself). But there is a problem: The doll-maker's young apprentice (Gerhard Ritterband) accidentally breaks the arm of the doll and now it is up to Hilarius' daughter Ossi to impersonate the doll in order to cover it up. Lancelot takes the doll/Ossi to his uncle's castle, where some of Lubitsch's most inventive gags occur as Lancelot mistakes real Ossi for the doll. He actually falls in love with the doll/Ossi. And the wedding scenes alone are some of the funniest moments ever filmed.

If you are a fan of Lubitsch, "Die Puppe" is an essential viewing.

People speak of the Lubitsch Touch first showing up in THE OYSTER PRINCESS, but that movie always struck me me as a a good romantic comedy, dimmed by changes in fashion, creaking a bit in age.

But this movie is the real thing: a silly story told with much flair and constant surprises. It begins with Lubitsch showing you a model of the set, like Penn and Teller showing you how they do the cup-and-ball trick, followed by a show that dazzles you: pantomime horses, venal monks and a little bit of E.T.A. Hoffman all fall under the thrall of Lubitsch and all of them, and the audience too, end up with smiles on their faces.

This movie is too good to more than hint at its wonders. If you have never seen a silent feature, see this one.

The opening shot of Ernst Lubitsch's The Doll announces wordlessly that it's going to be...different. A man, Lubitsch himself, comes out and sets up a house and yard with paper on a table, which we then zoom in on and two characters exit the house to start the story. What follows is an unrealistic tale of love and fantasy that delights and entertains while providing what seems to be the earliest form of the Lubitsch Touch. This isn't the tale of high society and wit that Lubitsch became famous for, but it's really close to it.

The Baron of Chanterelle (Max Kronert) is frustrated because he has only one heir, his nephew Lancelot (Hermann Thimig), and Lancelot has seemingly no interest in women or extending the family line. He dictates that Lancelot must marry, and he decrees it to the whole kingdom, sending all forty eligible maidens into a Benny Hill-esque chase for Lancelot around the storybook looking country as the Baron chases behind, taking spoonfuls of medicine from his assistant as he goes. It's amusing and delightful, and it ends with Lancelot finding refuge in the local abbey, led by the abbot (Jakob Tiedtke), where the friars all sit around, bemoan their near ruinous state as they eat large portions of pork and bread. Lancelot begs them to grant him a safe space from his uncle's grasp, and they let him in.

It's when the Baron puts an ad in the kingdom's newspaper begging Lancelot to come back with a promise of several hundred thousand kroner as a dowry that the abbot reads, giving him a great idea. He'll connect Lancelot with the renowned dollmaker Hilarius (Victor Janson), and Lancelot can bring a female doll with him to the Baron to trick him into thinking that Lancelot has married. He'll be able to take the dowry and give it to the abbey so they'll never run out of pork knuckles! Nothing about this is terribly deep, and it's sometimes a bit too thin (why does Lancelot agree to give all the money to the abbey? I dunno). However, the meat of the film is the titular doll.

Hilarius has created his newest doll and modeled it after his daughter Ossi (Ossi Oswalda, in a dual role). When Hilarius' apprentice (Gerhard Ritterband) accidentally breaks the arm of the doll, Ossi decides to protect him (why? Unclear) by pretending to be the doll just as Lancelot shows up to pick a doll for his ruse. The film becomes an outright farce with Ossi pretending to be the doll with Lancelot dragging her around as she maintains the ruse. Why she does it is unclear, but the comic effect is sustained surprisingly well through the series of events. She keeps her arms up and maintains a static smile while obviously getting a kick out of the whole thing (her most likely motivation: it simply entertains her). She keeps it up through the wedding ball where she has to balance her need to maintain the fiction for Lancelot while happily dropping it here and there when Lancelot isn't looking to grab some food or drink or just dance with the Baron. Lancelot's innocent inability to grasp the situation (married to the storybook method of the film's telling) is the source of a lot of the comedy in the story, and that Lubitsch leaned so heavily into the storybook visual motifs throughout shows that he knew there needed to be a level of artifice around the events to give it the kind of narrative space necessary to sell the events to the audience.

This farce of intentionally mistaken identities along with the high society, European setting is what makes it feel more in line with the later perception of Lubitsch and his work, but that outright storybook visual aesthetic and lack of wit in the dialogue (there's not none, but it's extremely limited by the silent film format, relegating the little wit it can display in dialogue to intertitles) makes it feel like a proto-form of what Lubitsch would later become known for.

The resolution of the plot threads lead the pair back to the abbey after the successful conning of the Baron (since Ossi is a real person and not a doll, was it really a conning?), and Ossi's identity gets fully revealed, leading to the two falling in love. Why? It's thin stuff, but it's amusing. However, the depth of character required isn't quite captured. And yet, this isn't Carmen, this is The Doll. It's a farce and a comedy, and there's enough work done to make the comedy work and the narrative flow, just not enough to make the heart sing by the end.

I really appreciate the deep weirdness of the film, offset by the farcical aspects. Whenever I see a female doll like this in a film, I automatically think of the dehumanizing look at the titular character in Fellini's Casanova. It's nice to see this detail played more lightly, though I imagine this was an influence on Fellini later.

This is something of a nice gem in Lubitsch's early career. It's light and frothy farce that could have benefited from a stronger approach to its characters to establish them and their motives. However, what drives the film is its light comic sensibilities which, when combined with the intentional storybook visual aesthetic, creates a delightful little trifle of a film that points to where Lubitsch was going to go later.

"The Doll" is a delightful feature--the best I've seen of director Ernst Lubitsch's German films. The deliberately artificial and often theatrical settings--flat backdrops, fake trees and people in horse costumes included--by Kurt Richter saliently add to the picture's enchantment and fairytale-like narrative. "The Doll" is similar in this approach to Maurice Tourneur's 1918 films "The Blue Bird" and "Prunella." Like "The Blue Bird," "The Doll" has a few moments that seem reminiscent of the feéries of early-cinema pioneer Georges Méliès, such as the Moon's facial expressions and the stop-motion animation to change the doll maker's hair. Highly-artificial theatricality was also adopted for "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1920), although in a very different way. Lubitsch begins the film well by appearing in front of the camera to introduce and arrange the mise-en-scène in miniature--a scene that then fades to the actual set and beginning of the story proper.

In it, the baron's nephew doesn't want to marry a woman, so he purchases what he believes is a life-size doll to be his wife. Meanwhile, a real woman, the doll maker's daughter, is pretending to be that doll to hide that the doll maker's apprentice broke the doll that was based on her appearance. So, the nephew thinks he's fooling everyone, when he's the one being fooled. It's a simple narrative, briskly plotted, and very well enacted. The inherent sexism isn't lost on Lubitsch either, as a humorous advertisement offers the doll maker's product to widowers and misogynists alike. Additionally, there are a few light sex jokes throughout. Ossi Oswalda is wonderful, cute and funny, with her various expressions and movements, including the dancing, as she plays the character masquerading as a lifeless doll. Her performance significantly helps make this photoplay entertaining. The slapstick and subplot antics between the wacky-looking doll maker and his young apprentice are even amusing and appreciated.

Dancing and a comedy chase make their way into this and other Lubitsch films. The themes of mistaken identity or masquerading as acting and doubles also underlie the humor of several Lubitsch comedies, in Germany and America. His three earliest comedies that I've seen ("The Merry Jail," "I Don't Want to Be a Man" and "The Oyster Princess") all play with these ideas in different and self-reflexive ways, with characters pretending to be someone else. The girl isn't only doubled as a doll; her image is literally doubled photographically during a dream scene. Moreover, the theme of fakery extends further in "The Doll": the dolls are fake, a real woman fakes being one of them, which is supported by the fake appearance of much of the film's production design. The entire production coalesces to firmly establish the film's world as fantasy. The sets and designs of Lubitsch's German films seem to have always been impressive, but in some of them, it feels that they overwhelm their plays, or that the narratives and characters were never equal to the grand décors, but in "The Doll," it all fits together.