Sabine Hake in Passions and Deception: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch, calls The Oyster Princess, ‘the first Lubitsch comedy that shows a distinct filmic style’ (p. 40), and cites Béla Bálazs as writing ‘Here the comic mode already emanates from a directorial style that is founded on self mockery. Film fashions and film manners, even filmic effects are unmasked , and all that only through a slight touch of exxageration’ (pp.40-41).
In The Oyster Princess, a rich American oyster heiress (Ossie Oswalda) living in a palace German Aristocrats can no longer afford wants to get married. Her friend has nabbed a count so her father, Mister Quaker (Victor Janson), promises a prince. They go through the list of candidates and find a tip-top but poor one, Prince Nucki (Harry Liedtke). Before he commits, however, he sends his valet, Josef (Julius Falkenstein) to check her out first and, after a series of incidents, it is Josef who ends up married to Ossie. However, the real prince and the oyster princess eventually meet accidentally, fancy each other rotten, and everything ends happily ever after.
Ossie Oswalda throws things around with delightful exuberance. Lubitsch uses rhythmic repetition again, servants and servants and servants, or money being borrowed from person to person to person to person, diminishing at each stage for comic effect. There are apprentices: Gerhard Ritterband, the same one that got slapped around in Die Puppe, gets slapped around again, and again to comic effect. There’s a bandleader (Curt Bois) who boosts the orchestra into a frenzied fox-trot and accentuates each change in rhythm with a sharp jut of his butt.
There is a fantastic fox-trot sequence which is like a musical number with all the energetic and utopian thrust such numbers would later convey in Classic Hollywood . It’s very long, with dancing all over the house, including through the kitchens, the stairways and so on and is a cinematic tour-de-force .
The film exudes a love of all things American, particularly its assertion of democracy. The Oyster King is obviously a grotesque parody of an American millionaire but he’s as good as anybody, can buy princes who in this film are not expected to be either bright or useful, and is not impressed by anything except love. The sets are still papier-maché-y but opulent; the clothes delightful. Americans are satirised but fondly and with admiration; and the coming together of German Aristocracy and American Democracy are seen as an ideal, one better enjoyed in bed and best seen through a key-hole.
Hake beleives that ‘with The Oyster Princess Lubitsch had come into his own (p. 41). One can but agree.
José Arroyo