A Boneca do Amor

Such a charmer. It certainly feels like a Lubitsch film, as it pushes boundaries with sex but in a playful way, makes cheeky observations about human behavior, and has entertaining characters skating along in a light comedy. Pretty impressive, especially for 1919, and well worth 66 minutes.

Some of the bits I liked:

• Seeing Lubitsch himself as the film begins, setting up the doll house which the characters then inhabit.

• The performances from Ossi Oswalda (the daughter/doll) and Gerhard Ritterband (the young apprentice). Oswalda's facial expressions and body control as the doll are wonderful, and Ritterband imitations of his boss were amusing. I also chuckled when he kisses his boss's wife after having kissed the doll, "Just so no one feels neglected," and how he later says he's throwing himself out the window out of shame, only to slide out easily from the first story.

• The artistry in the set designs, which while not boldly Expressionistic, have quite a flair, making the film a treat visually. You also get a couple of clearly fake horses, little effects like a montage of close-ups of chattering mouths, a transparency during a dream sequence, and a man's hair turning white when he gets shocking news.

• The doll being advertised as follows: "Offered to bachelors, widowers, and misogynists! I have succeeded, with the help of a mechanism I built, in constructing a human-like doll who can walk, dance, and sing by pushing different buttons." And as an aside, the toymaker has designed it to look like his daughter, even though it's a short leap to think of it as a sex doll being peddled to lonely (and abusive?) men, how creepy is that?

• The priests chowing down food like pigs, not wanting to share, and then finagling their way into getting their hands on the boy's dowry. One of them later ogles the "doll's" legs while she's dancing.

• The family members arguing over possessions before a loved one has even passed away, breaking a vase in the process.

• How the guy who is afraid of girls goes from being chased all over town by 40 young women who all want to marry him to being in the showroom at the dollmaker's, confronted by (probably 40, the same 40) dolls who all hop over to him eagerly, nodding their heads.

• The various innuendo once the young man does take possession of what he thinks is a doll. The toymaker tells him "Don't forget to oil her every two weeks." His father asks him whether he wants any last advice before leaving for the first night of his marriage, to which he replies "No thanks, I have an instruction manual." Oh my goodness, if this isn't classic Ernst Lubitsch, I don't know what is.

"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.

"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.

'The Doll', directed by Ernst Lubitsch, is a charming fantasy, a splendidly original film inspired by one of the Tales of Hoffmann ... and a movie which also captures the mood of English holiday pantomimes and Hans Christian Andersen. As a bonus, this film features an extremely kinky performance (very funny and sexy at the same go) by the delightful actress Ossi Oswalda.

In the opening shot we see the great Lubitsch himself, setting up a doll's house against a stylised backdrop. A close-up of this model then dissolves into a full-sized version of the same stylised setting, from which emerge actors dressed as dolls. From this point onward, the entire film is staged on highly stylised sets ... much like 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari', except that these sets are bright and airy.

Old Baron Chanterelle has no family except for his gormless nephew Lancelot. To continue the line, the Baron offers his nephew a dowry of 300,000 francs to get married. But Lancelot is afraid of women. The local prior shows him an advertisement from the dollmaker Hilarius, who offers a special service 'for bachelors, widowers and misogynists': a life-size clockwork girl! Lancelot decides to marry the mechanical bride, collect the dowry, then stash the doll in the attic.

Hilarius, for some reason, has made his clockwork doll an exact duplicate of his pretty daughter Ossi (anticipating a similar plot device in the 1949 film 'The Perfect Woman'). The clockwork girl has a control panel on her back (like Julie Newmar in 'My Living Doll') and a crank to wind her up.

The real Ossi decides to do some winding up herself: playing a joke on Lancelot, she attaches the control panel and the handcrank to her own back and pretends to be the doll. Of course there are problems when the 'doll' sneezes or coughs, and eventually Ossi gets hungry and thirsty because nobody offers the doll any refreshments. (How does she handle toilet breaks?)

In a frilly outfit with a short skirt, Ossi is very pretty as both the mechanical girl and the real one. There is some surprisingly good double-exposure in a couple of camera set-ups when the real Ossi and the mechanical one are onscreen simultaneously. Brilliant camerawork throughout by the great Theodor Sparkuhl.

Remarkably, Lancelot goes from the wedding banquet to the bridal chamber without ever twigging that his clockwork bride is the genuine article. (We don't see the wedding itself; perhaps Lubitsch feared that audiences would be offended by the idea of a man exchanging wedding vows with an inhuman object ... and in fact, an insert shot of a wedding certificate establishes that the wedding was a civil ceremony, not a religious one.)

The great charm of this film is its mood of fairy-tale unreality. The coachman's horses are played by men in pantomime-horse costumes. A cat and a rooster are played by cut-out figures. The moon has a human face, looking rather too much like Oscar Levant! I enjoyed a bizarre scene in which an entire roomful of mechanical girls dance for Lancelot.

There's also a remarkable early example of pixilation (stop-action animation using actors rather than mannequins) in a gag sequence in which Hilarius's hair stands on end, then turns white.

The sequences of Ossi (the real one) dancing stiffly while pretending to be a clockwork girl remind me of the sequence in 'Metropolis' when the female robot takes her first awkward steps. (Could this film have influenced 'Metropolis'?) A comedy sequence in this film prefigures a similar sequence in Buster Keaton's 'Seven Chances', when forty women bent on matrimony pursue Lancelot through the streets.

'The Doll' is an absolute delight from beginning to end, a film that the entire family will enjoy. I regret only that the German intertitles were set in a Fraktur typeface which made them very difficult to read. I'll rate this delightful movie 10 out of 10.

I caught this on TCM, it is a completely captivating and delightful experience for all ages, so many layers in this story. Cannot recommend it enough for its period charm and generally kookiness.

However, the cast list here on IMDB is a mess due to faulty translations. "Dessen Frau" means "His Wife", and refers to Baron Chanterelle (chanterelles are a group of mushrooms, much eaten in Germany in late summer/autumn.) Similarly, "His Daughter" (Ossi, or The Doll) again refers to the Baron as her father. "The Briar" (!) should, I think, be The Friar; only in the film he is in fact the Abbot of the monastery, not merely a Brother. Wikipedia gets it all correct on its page about this film.