The Oyster Princess (Die Austernprinzessin) (Projektions AG-Union [PAGU], Berliner Union-Film, 1919)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 13) my husband Charles and I watched on Turner Classic Movies’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” program an engaging 1919 slapstick comedy from Germany, Die Austerprinzessin (“The Oyster Princess”), directed by the young Ernst Lubitsch (his 30th screen credit in just five years as a director) and co-written by him and Hanns Kräly, who was to Lubitsch what Robert Riskin was to Frank Capra, Dudley Nichols to John Ford, and the less well-known Charles Bennett to Alfred Hitchcock. Alas, the collaboration between Lubitsch and Kräly ended suddenly in 1930, by which time both men had relocated to Hollywood, when Lubitsch caught Kräly having an affair with Lubitsch’s wife, actress Helene Krauss. Rather than react in the detached ah-what-the-hell, men-will-be-men-and-women-will-be-women way of a Lubitsch character, Lubitsch got toweringly jealous and banned Kräly from all his future projects. Kräly lived for another 20 years (surviving Lubitsch by three years: Lubitsch died in 1947 and Kräly in 1950) and, despite the statement on his Wikipedia page that his career never recovered after his break with Lubitsch, Kräly got his name on quite a few important films, including adapting Noël Coward’s Private Lives (1931) for its screen version and working on James Whale’s By Candlelight (1933) and Henry Koster’s One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937). Kräly’s last credit during his lifetime was for a not-very-good Universal horror film called The Mad Ghoul (1943), though he has some posthumous credits from remakes of films he’d written earlier.

For Die Austernprinzessin Lubitsch and Kräly came up with a madcap comedy closer to slapstick and farce than the comical romances Lubitsch became known for later, especially in the early 1930’s. The story is a very class-conscious tale of an American oyster tycoon, Mr. Quaker (Viktor Janson), whose restive daughter Ossi (Ossi Oswalda) shows her discontent by throwing vases on the floor and ripping up newspapers. She demands to get married, and her dad decides to find her an impoverished prince who will marry into the Quaker family for the accompanying fortune. Mr. Quaker goes to a matchmaker, Seligsöhn (Max Kronert), whose office walls are lined with headshots of various young and not-so-young men, and picks out a prince for his daughter. He picks Prince Nucki (the surprisingly good-looking Harry Liedtke), who when we see him is living in a walk-up room in a dilapidated apartment building with his “friend,” Josef (Julius Falkenstein). We get the impression that Josef is actually Prince Nucki’s former manservant, who’s stayed with him even though Nucki no longer has the money to pay him. We’re instantly told what dire straits Nucki is in when we see him working at a basin, hand-washing all his dirty laundry and hanging his long black socks on an indoor clothesline. When Seligsöhn knocks on their door, Nucki is cautious and at first won’t let him in – doubtless he fears he’s being set on by another bill collector – and when Josef finally lets the matchmaker in, Nucki is sitting on a preposterously high stack of chairs to give the illusion that he’s occupying a throne. Mr. Quaker’s home is preposterously overdecorated, and its staff is as over-the-top as his décor. In the opening scene he’s shown dictating a letter to a roomful of white female secretaries – apparently his home is a live-work space – and he’s being attended to by four Black men in costumes that suggest they got sidetracked from a Marcus Garvey event and ended up in Germany by mistake. The effect makes Die Austernprinzessin look like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton commandeered one of Cecil B. DeMille’s ultra-huge interior sets and decided to stage a slapstick comedy on it.

Eventually Nucki and Josef show up at the Quaker home – and immediately Ossi mistakes Josef for Nucki and insists he’s the prince she’s supposed to marry. She takes him for a carriage drive through the streets and even finds a minister in an open street-level window, who performs the ceremony then and there. Only Ossi refuses to sleep in the same bed as Josef; she banishes him to a separate bedroom across the hallway. The actual wedding party follows, with Quaker’s servants feeding his guests course after course in a strictly ordered scene that looks like a Busby Berkeley musical number over a decade early. Josef sneaks away and consumes Quaker’s entire supply of alcoholic beverages, then keeps saying, “I’m so happy!” After the dinner comes a wild scene that the intertitles refer to as a “Fox-Trot Epidemic,” in which just about everyone there, from the upper classes to the servants, pair off in opposite-sex couples and dance to the music of a band conducted by actor Kurt Bois, who’s so hyperactive at the podium he looks as much or more like a dancer than anyone else in the film. Prince Nucki gets an invitation from some of his “friends” to go out on a spree, and there’s a charming scene in which he asks to borrow some money from the only friend of his who has any – only as the sum is passed down the line of Nucki’s “friends,” each one takes a bill as a sort of cut and the money is down to just two bills by the time it gets down to Nucki. When he returns from his spree, Ossi is in the middle of leading a meeting of the “Multi-Millionaires’ Daughters Against Dipsomania,” and of course Nucki (of whom Ossi has no idea who he really is) is Ossi’s chosen victim for her “reform” efforts. Ultimately Ossi and Nucki hide out in Ossi’s bedroom, where Mr. Quaker and Josef discover them. Mr. Quaker is shocked at first, but Josef explains that when he married Ossi, he used Nucki’s name, so it ends up with Nucki and Ossi paired off as a legally wedded couple and Quaker and Josef happy about the outcome.

In her outro, TCM’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart tried to tie this into Lubitsch’s later comedies and musicals (one could make a good case that Lubitsch invented the rom-com), but as I noted above it’s really more of a slapstick film than anything, albeit one full of the so-called “Lubitsch touches” that would become his trademark. At that, it’s a charming little film (running just over an hour long) and a welcome lesson that German comedies (this one, anyway) from the silent era could be genuinely funny despite the reputation of Germans as … well, let’s just quote the line from Peter Sellers’s Goon Squad BBC radio show (the ancestor of Monty Python 20 years early), in which Sellers in his best faux-German accent says, “Who says ve Germans haff no sense of humor?” – and the audience yells back in unison, “Just about everybody!”