Vintage film watching is like genealogical investigation. Sometimes engaging in a movie from decades ago can feel like you’re watching the quirks and obsessions of ghostly personalities long lost to the ether.
But the truth is that with great movies, just like branching family trees, the apples fall and seed entirely new progeny, creating a continuum and a conversation between the generations.
Just look at this year’s Vintage Film Festival lineup. Without The Searchers, Luke Skywalker doesn’t get off the farm and Star Wars doesn’t get past Act One; and, without Cléo de 5 à 7, Frances doesn’t “Ha” in Frances Ha.
However, the best example of this comes in Billy Wilder’s gender-bending romp Some Like It Hot. Sure, we could draw clear lines between Some Like it Hot and a whole pantheon of Will Farrell tomfoolery, or perhaps even suggest that it busted the door open for more modern drag movies like The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of The Desert; but what actually cements Some Like it Hot firmly on its own branch of the cinematic family tree is that it also wears its own movie inspiration on its sleeve, in the form of a Great Director who started making movies a generation before Wilder himself: the one and only Ernst Lubitsch.
Billy Wilder (1906-2002), was the son of cake shop owners from Sucha, Poland, who worked as a writer and paid ballroom dance partner in Berlin, before moving to Hollywood in 1934 to start his prolific career as a screenwriter.
One of Wilder’s early Hollywood writing successes was the Greta Garbo vehicle Ninotchka
(1939), directed by Billy’s mentor, fellow German immigrant Ernst Lubitsch. Lubitsch’s own directing career is staggering. He was responsible for The Shop Around The Corner (1940), To Be Or Not To Be (1942), and Heaven Can Wait (1943), just to name three, as well as a swath of silent sex comedies like The Wildcat (1921).
Throughout his career, Wilder spoke of what he called “The Lubitsch Touch”—a sort of calling card approach to comedy that he took as a sacred lesson. Here’s how Billy described it himself in Cameron Crowe’s 1999 Interview book Conversations with Wilder: “It was the elegant use of the Superjoke. You had the joke, and you felt satisfied, and then there was one more big joke on top of it. The joke you didn’t expect.”
Wilder employed this approach throughout his comic directing oeuvre: The Seven Year Itch (1955), The Apartment (1960), and Irma la Douce (1963). And, yes, I know I’m entirely glossing over his great thrillers and noirs like Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), and Ace in The Hole (1951); but let’s get back to Some Like it Hot and explore what I think might be the absolutely best case study of The Lubitsch Touch.
Cowritten by frequent Wilder collaborator I.A.L. Diamond, Some Like It Hot follows two musicians, played by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, who, after witnessing a mob murder, go undercover in drag as members of a travelling all-girl band. They vie for the affections of ukulele player Sugar Kane Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe) in a romp of a second act, before emerging in sunny Florida, where the mobsters from the film’s opening are booked into the same hotel as the band.
Now spoilers ahead as the next section concerns the very final moment of the movie, but also shows Lubitsch’s colossal posthumous effect.
While in Miami, Jack Lemmon as “Daphne” is pursued by a prissy, aging millionaire named Osgood Fielding III, played by Joe E. Brown. Much of this unconventional courtship involves upstairs-downstairs shenanigans which culminate when, in an attempt to save his and Tony Curtis’s skins, Daphne/Jerry/Jack Lemmon promises to marry Osgood.
However, in the final moments of the movie, in a desperate attempt to get out of his promise, Daphne lists all the reasons she cannot marry Osgood: a smoking habit, being infertile etc., all of which Osgood grins through with pleasant aplomb. Finally, Jerry drops the drag act and exclaims, “I’m a man!”
Now, this is where your regular run-of-the-mill drag comedy might end: a big reveal and a screwed-up mug to camera from the hapless boyfriend—but not in Some Like it Hot, not from Billy Wilder, and not on the Lubitsch family tree.
Osgood smiles ear to ear, casually steering the speedboat, and flippantly announces: “Well, nobody’s perfect.”
That’s the Lubitsch Touch! The Superjoke, the double entendre that makes you realize you may have experienced a triple entendre, the tidy bow on the end of a great comedic scenario that leaves you breathless from laughter and utterly speechless.
And, while we’ve spent a considerable word count tying The Lubitsch Touch backwards in time from Wilder to Lubistch himself, it’s also seen in nearly every episode of Seinfeld, or Curb Your Enthusiasm, when three plot lines converge to serve Larry David his comeuppance and the “Directed By: Robert B. Weide” title card hits the screen.
This exploration of the sublime joys of vintage film watching, the cinematic family tree, and two of the most brilliant comedy directors of all time was perhaps actually about reminding ourselves that some funny things are always funny, which makes The Lubitsch Touch Wilder left as his own tombstone epitaph ironically apt: “I’m a Writer, but then Nobody’s Perfect”.
Well, maybe nobody’s perfect, but some jokes are.