Abstract

This essay argues that the inferential aspects of Ernst Lubitsch's style, often taken as a way of dealing with censorable material, might, in fact, achieve a kind of censorship in themselves. With a focus on a distinctive stylistic trope that became common in his 1930s films, the essay explores how style creates an ambiguity around character emotion in four films. With an extended analysis of how this trope functions in Angel (1937), the essay claims a modernist play on perception unusual in Hollywood classical cinema.

Keywords: censorship, romantic comedy, thematic music, visual style, ambiguity of perception, modernism

A woman who finds herself in a boring marriage to a British diplomat travels to Paris incognito as Mrs. Braun to meet up with an old friend, a Russian emigre Duchess, who now runs a gambling house-cum-bordello and helps wealthy men make assignations with women appropriate to their class, but in need of cash. There Mrs. Braun encounters and spends a romantic evening with a man who is instantly smitten with her, a man she possibly has sex with. Without ever identifying herself, without saying goodbye, she leaves the man and returns to her married life in England.