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“... My Nazis are different,’ Ernst Lubitsch said in reply to critics who hadn’t liked his film To Be or Not to Be. The critics thought he was failing to be funny about what shouldn’t be laughed at anyway, the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Lubitsch – we can read his response in the material accompanying the recently issued Criterion DVD version of the film – thought the critics had failed to see how even Nazism could become a routine, a home for stock figures and therefore mechanical, ridiculous ...”

“... and graceful, but you don’t leave the world of displacements and associations behind. The film, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop around the Corner, now completing a run at the BFI, is all about associations and displacements. Where are we, for example? A title card says we’re in Budapest, and the film is based on a play, Parfumerie, by Miklós ...”

“... run baseball floating in the air, unmistakably baseball and unmistakably Ruth. And Henry Major’s Ernst Lubitsch, Will Cotton’s Theodore Dreiser, Hirschfeld’s Bojangles Robinson, and more and more, all well-known and all made new. That shock of the familiar, the celebrity instantly recognisable by the trademark logo that the artist reinvents ...”

“... by the autumn enrolled some four thousand members – including such celebrities as Eddie Cantor, Ernst Lubitsch, Boris Karloff and Dorothy Parker. In newsletters and radio broadcasts, at meetings, demonstrations and banquets, it called for a boycott of German products and vociferously supported the Spanish Republic and thus, for Breen, who sympathised ...”

“... of any of it. The screenwriter, Billy Wilder, was remembering pre-Hitler Europe and the director, Ernst Lubitsch, was remembering his visits to Moscow. Garbo could barely remember the boat from Sweden, and her idea of a threatening mass movement was too much fan mail. But when it comes to the movie stars, keeping your wits about you is hard work, because ...”

“... for its revelation of awkwardness in a cinema celebrity. Eyman has also written excellent books on Ernst Lubitsch, Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford, and about the moment when sound changed the art and business of pictures. I think this is Eyman’s best and most heartfelt book. And the reason these two biographies are so compelling is that the uneasy cut ...”

“... produce a feature with music and incidental dialogue. On the advice of their top contract director Ernst Lubitsch, the brothers paid $50,000 for the rights to Samson Raphaelson’s The Jazz Singer which, though dismissed by Hearst’s New York American as ‘a garish and tawdry Hebrew play’, had run for a season on Broadway with George Jessel in the ...”

“... signs of returning interest, there is a new Masters of Cinema version of her most important film, Ernst Lubitsch’s Madame DuBarry (1919). In the greater world, her most lasting achievement may be that she invented and popularised the practice of painting toenails red. (Adolphe Menjou thought her feet were bleeding.) She remains an exemplary ...”

“... or conclusive answers.’ Cultural studies leaves no stone unturned. There is an analysis of Ernst Lubitsch’s first full-length film, made in 1916, long before he got to Hollywood, called Schuhpalast Pinkus (‘Pinkus’s Shoe Palace’), which is discussed by Jeanette Malkin in terms of the split between the Berlin Jews and the ...”

“... in Europe. In fact, Pasetti was more a gambler than a singer, and he and Lenya, like a couple in a Lubitsch comedy, worked the casinos from Baden-Baden to Monte Carlo. Whenever another ‘sure’ system failed and they were in need of financial assistance, Weill helped them out with rabbinical equanimity. In the end Lenya and Pasetti parted much less amicably ...”