The Doll (Projektions-AG Union, Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft [UFA], 1919)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The other Ernst Lubitsch film Turner Classic Movies showed November 17 was The Doll (1919), made while Lubitsch was still in Germany. It’s a rather arch tale about a young man, Lancelot von Chauterelle (Hermann Thimig), whose uncle, Baron von Chauterelle (Max Kronert), is getting worried that he doesn’t have an heir and the Chauterelle name will die out if his nephew doesn’t hurry up, marry a woman and produce some kids already. “I won’t marry a woman!” Lancelot insists, in a scene that makes it look (at least to a 2024 audience) as if he’s about to come out as Gay. Instead he seeks out the home of renowned toymaker Hilarius (Victor Janson), who after years of making dolls in normal sizes has just perfected a life-size replica of his daughter Ossi (Ossi Oswalda), complete with a wind-up crank and a series of button controls on its back. Lancelot hears about Hilarius’s invention and thinks it’s the perfect solution: he’ll buy the doll, go through a mock marriage ceremony with it, get the 300,000-franc dowry his uncle is offering him once he’s married, and then he’ll donate the money to the local monastery and live out his days as a monk. Only Hilarius’s apprentice (Gerhard Rittenband) breaks the arm of the replica Ossi and the real Ossi agrees to take its place just as long as Lancelot visits and wants a life-sized doll. Both Charles and I thought this was going to be a 20-minute comedy short, but it stretched out to over an hour and the one joke really couldn’t sustain it – though even in a film this early there are typical Lubitsch “touches,” like the scene in which the genuinely human guests at Lancelot’s and Ossi’s wedding move as mechanically as the dolls in the sequences at Hilarius’s workshop.

But it’s a one-joke movie and the one joke pretty quickly wears out its welcome, despite some nice scenes back at the monastery in which Ossi gets worried that the monks plan to lock her inside their junk room. There’s also a prologue in which a puppeteer (the film’s German title is Der Puppe, which can mean either “the doll” or “the puppet”) played by Ernst Lubitsch himself sets up a doll house and puts up various sets and props around it, which seems to suggest that the entire story is a fantasy and all the characters are dolls. For some reason, at least according to Jacqueline Stewart, Lubitsch regarded The Doll as one of his best films and frequently cited it, along with two other German comedies, among his greatest works. Far be it from me to disagree with the great Lubitsch, but The Doll strikes me – in spite of some truly inspired moments – as a pretty leaden would-be farce with an overall heaviness typical of German attempts at humor. (It reminded me of a line from one of the old BBC Goon Squad radio shows, which launched Peter Sellers on his career and were basically Monty Python before Monty Python, in which Sellers said in his best comic-German accent, “Who said ve Germans haff no sense of humor?,” and a chorus of voices replied, “Just about everybody.”) The credits list 19th century author E. T. A. Hoffmann as the source for the original story, though I suspect Lubitsch and co-writer Hans Kräly took little from Hoffmann except the basic concept of a life-sized doll that successfully impersonates a human being. The imdb.com page also lists A. E. Willner as composer of an operetta based on the tale, though of course the greatest musical adaptation of the mechanical-doll storyline is the “Olympia” act of Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann, which has everything this rather leaden film lacks: genuine wit, subtlety, humor and even pathos. There’s one interesting name on the behind-the-camera credits for The Doll: the cinematographers are Theodor Sparkühl and Kurt Waschneck, and like a lot of German Jews in the movie business, Sparkühl emigrated after Hitler and the Nazis took power in 1933, moving first to France (where he was billed as Théodore Sparkuhl) and then to the U.S. (where he was Theodore Sparkuhl, no accents and no umlauts), where he settled at Paramount and shot some of the most important early-1940’s films noir.