Tag Archives: Ernst Lubitsch

DONNA RIFKIND ON SALKA VIERTEL

The unconcerned sunbathers on the beach [in Los Angeles], their hairless bodies glistening and brown, the gigantic trucks rumbling on the highway, the supermarkets with their mountains of food, the studios with the oh-so-relaxed employees, the chatting extras pouring out from the stages at lunch time, the pompous executives marching to their “exclusive dining room” or the barbershop, stopping to chat with the endearing “young talent”—all these familiar scenes were a nerve-wracking contrast to the war horror…

What the [studio] producers want is an original but familiar, unusual but popular, moralistic but sexy, true but improbable, tender but violent, slick but highbrow masterpiece. When they have that, then they can “work on it” and make it “commercial” to justify their high salaries. — Salka Viertel

Salka Viertel was an Austrian actress and very early exile from Europe’s rising Fascist tide who settled in Santa Monica in 1928 to become a Hollywood scenarist, close friend of Greta Garbo, and catalyst behind an expanding West Coast salon of expats dubbed “Weimar on the Pacific” by Ehrhard Bahr.

As part of UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance virtual program L.A. Omnibus, Donna Rifkind—author of The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood—will discuss Viertel’s achievements within her circle, which included Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, Sergei Eisenstein, Arnold Schoenberg, Christopher Isherwood, and Aldous Huxley. See link below for details.

As I began to read the histories of the two intersecting arenas where Salka Viertel rang up her accomplishments during the 1930s and 1940s—the film studios of Hollywood’s Golden Age and the gathering places of the antifascist emigration—I found myself asking again and again: where are all the women? I read dozens of thoughtful, entertaining, even groundbreaking works about Hollywood in which women who were not wives, secretaries, or movie stars scarcely make an appearance. Yet women worked in every department of the studios. They were screenwriters, editors, researchers, readers, publicists, costumers, hair and makeup artists. Often below the line and unglorified, women were nonetheless vital to the success of these vast, complex organizations, and some of them wielded genuine influence if not actual power. Where are their stories? — Donna Rifkind*

L.A. OMNIBUS—DONNA RIFKIND

Center for the Art of Performance UCLA

Thursday, October 8.

7 pm on the West Coast; 10 pm East Coast.

*Donna Rifkind, from the introduction to The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood (New York: Other Press, 2020).

From top: Salka Viertel (right) and Greta Garbo at Viertel’s house, 165 Mabery Road, Santa Monica; Viertel in Anna Christie (1931), photograph courtesy and © MGM, via Photofest; Salka Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, cover image courtesy and © New York Review Books; Donna Rifkind, The Sun and Her Stars, cover image courtesy and © Other Press; Rifkind, courtesy and © the author; Sergei Eisenstein and Viertel in Santa Monica in the 1930s.

IRIS BARRY’S HISTORY OF FILM

Iris Barry was the first curator of MOMA’s Film Library, founded in 1935. The museum’s matinee series IRIS BARRY’S HISTORY OF FILM brings together selections from her early programs.

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN

Friday, December 20, at 1:30 pm.

DREAM OF A RAREBIT FIEND and THE NAVIGATOR

Monday, December 23, at 1:30 pm.

THE FRESHMAN

Tuesday, December 24, at 1:30 pm.

DRESSED TO KILL

Thursday, December 26, at 1:30 pm.

SHE DONE HIM WRONG

Friday, December 27, at 1:30 pm.

THE LOVE PARADE

Monday, December 30, at 1:30 pm.

TRANSATLANTIC

Tuesday, December 31, at 1:30 pm.

Museum of Modern Art

11 West 53rd Street, New York City.

From top: Donald Crisp and Buster Keaton, The Navigator (1924), with Keaton; Ernst Lubitsch, The Love Parade (1929); Irving Cummings, Dressed to Kill (1928); Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, The Freshman (1925), with Harold Lloyd; William K. Howard, Transatlantic (1931); Lowell Sherman, She Done Him Wrong (1933), with Mae West (right); Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin (1925), (2). Images courtesy of Photofest and MOMA.

GARBO AND LUBITSCH

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“Garbo Laughs” was the tagline for the legend’s last great film, NINOTCHKA. Perhaps it was the freedom of retirement on the horizon that brought a smile to her face.

NINOTCHKA—a satire on Soviet severity, among other things—was written by Billy WilderCharles Brackett, and Walter Reisch, and directed by Ernst Lubitsch, the subject of the UCLA Film and Television Archive retrospective How Did Lubitsch Do It?

Prior to this weekend’s screening, Joseph McBride will sign copies of his new book which gives the series its title.

(NINOTCHKA is on a double-bill with one of Margaret Sullavan’s best films THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER.)

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NINOTCHKA and THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER, Saturday, July 7, at 7:30 pm.

Booksigning at 6:30 pm.

BILLY WILDER THEATER, HAMMER MUSEUM, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood, Los Angeles.

cinema.ucla.edu/ninotchka-shop-around-corner

See Richard Brody on the film: newyorker.com/ninotchka

Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

cup.columbia.edu/how-did-lubitsch-do-it

Greta Garbo in 1939. Ninotchka publicity photograph by Clarence Bull.

Related image

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OZON’S FRANTZ

Berliner Paula Beer—new to American audiences, and winner of the Best New Young Actor award at last year’s Venice film festival—has been starring in movies for over eight years. But her performance in François Ozon ’s riveting new film FRANTZ is a breakthrough. She plays Anna to Pierre Niney’s Adrien, two young Europeans negotiating the aftermath of the Great War and their connection to the title character, Anna’s dead fiancé.

The plot mirrors Ernst Lubitsch’s Broken Melody, but like most of Ozon’s work, FRANTZ goes nowhere you think it might. The film ends, speculatively, in the 1920s, and a scene at the Louvre prompts a question: Will Anna’s love for a painting about death save her life?

 

FRANTZ

Through April 6.

Nuart Theatre

11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles.

From April 7 at the Laemmle Monica, Playhouse (Pasadena), and Town Center (Encino).

Above: Pierre Niney in Frantz.

Below: Niney and Paula Beer.