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10 - Lubitsch, In and Out of Bed
- Edited by Brigitte Peucker, Yale University, Connecticut, Ido Lewit, The Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv
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- Book:
- New Approaches to Ernst Lubitsch
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 16 April 2024
- Print publication:
- 01 March 2024, pp 195-210
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Summary
Abstract
This essay addresses the recurrence of bed imagery in Lubitsch's films. The bed in Lubitsch serves as the nexus of sexual desire, a bringing to life but also a space of death, the point of beginnings but also of endings. The bed is given a temporal dimension, embodying the forces of both past and present while also foreshadowing the potentialities of the future.
Keywords: bed, movement, time, history, gesture
Awakenings
There are many beds in the films of Ernst Lubitsch, almost as many beds as there are doors. In the first image of The Wildcat (Die Bergkatze, Lubitsch, 1921), the doors of a military academy open to reveal a wide shot of a man playing a bugle. Immediately following this is another wide shot, this one of soldiers in bunk beds, the beds lined up against a white wall as the men begin to slowly, resentfully rise due to the bugler's noise. The shots that follow briefly alternate between the bugler continuing to play and one soldier hobbling across the room, shutting the window and then returning to his bed. But the soldier's need to sleep is so intense that he does not climb back into the bed. Instead, he miraculously jumps up into it and makes a landing. Sadly, all of this is for nothing as another door opens, this one inside the barracks, as a commanding officer steps into the room barking orders and the men respond by jumping out of bed and running over to their wash stands. The personal needs of the body to remain horizontal must now give way to the needs of the state. The human figure in Lubitsch will be central to what follows here. I wish to explore this by addressing the recurrence of moments centering around the bed, the bed as a nexus of desire, a bringing to life but also of death, a beginning but also an ending.
For a film of this period to have opened by showing humans awakening would hardly have been a singular gesture. Early in the cinema's history, where the physical and emotional states of human figures were tied to the temporal and mobile forms of cinema, such awakenings could serve as a metaphor for the “awakening” of the film itself.
8 - Falling Hard: The Sin of Harold Diddlebock
- from Part 2 - Cultural Commentary: History and Identity
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- By Joe McElhaney, Hunter College/City University
- Edited by Jeff Jaeckle, Sarah Kozloff
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- Book:
- ReFocus: The Films of Preston Sturges
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 05 September 2016
- Print publication:
- 08 October 2015, pp 173-190
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Summary
A STRANGE EPIPHANY
The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947) occupies an uncertain position in the filmography of Preston Sturges. It was the first and, as it turned out, last film he made as an independent producer after leaving Paramount, the studio where, between 1940 and 1944, his reputation as a writer-director was established. In 1944, Sturges and Howard Hughes formed California Pictures, an early example of the move toward independent production then being made by directors who had previously worked within the Hollywood studio system. But 1944 would also be the year Paramount released two of Sturges's biggest commercial successes, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (which opened in January but was filmed two years earlier) and Hail the Conquering Hero (which opened early in August). Late in August 1944, however, Paramount finally released The Great Moment, an important project for Sturges and, like Miracle, shot two years earlier. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek was, in spite of the enormous challenges it presented in terms of the dictates of the Hays Code (which were largely responsible for delaying the film's release), eventually shown in a version close to Sturges's intentions. The Great Moment, on the other hand, was significantly recut by the studio's head of production, B. G. De Sylva, a decision on De Sylva's part that was central in Sturges leaving Paramount. The Great Moment, a departure for Sturges, was a major critical and commercial disappointment. Diddlebock, which began shooting in September 1945, promised far greater control for Sturges and, consequently, the possibility of a return to critical and popular favor. But it, too, faced post-production problems, as well as an enormously protracted shooting schedule brought on by the comparative freedom Sturges was now luxuriating in as his own producer. Tentatively released two years later in Miami, Portland, and San Francisco to good reviews, the film was soon withdrawn by a dissatisfied Hughes and held up for three years, recut by him, and released in 1950 as Mad Wednesday. It, too, was a financial failure. In the years between Diddlebock and Mad Wednesday, Sturges signed a contract with Twentieth Century-Fox, where he made Unfaithfully Yours (1948) and The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (1949).