That Lady in Ermine

Ernst Lubitsch's style permeates this unjustly forgotten movie, from a different age of cinema. Oddly enough, any old film noir (or just crime-oriented) feature from its age is revered on a pedestal today, while this wonderful 20th Century-Fox big-budget effort stirs little interest.

It is a remake of a 1927 silent film of the same title, a Corinne Griffith star vehicle from First National Pictures, the distributor that later became part of Warner Brothers. It's a lost film, perhaps because a silent movie of an operetta was hopelessly dated even then. Lubitsch includes fantasy and satire here, with the play-acting performances of stars Grable and Fairbanks delightful in that they make fun of the antiquated Period Costume Film cliches, while simultaneously creating warm and empathetic characters. The elements of satire have given way in modern cinema to vulgarity, as evidenced in the work of Mel Brooks (who remade Lubtisch's hit "To Be Or Not to Be") or my favorite director Ken Russell, yet Lubitsch is able to maintain the high ground even in the silliest of scenes, perhaps aided by the censorship of his day.

The Technicolor photography (by Leon Shamroy) remains stunning and just what any film buff should admire. A couple of oddities struck me as I finally saw this movie, so many decades after release, first the foot-fetish theme that instantly suggests Luis Bunuel, who was working in Hollywood during this period. And by some odd coincidence, the starting point for the movie's fantasy element is the stunning portrait of Gable as a 17th Century ancestor of her main character, which comes to life occasionally. Fairbanks' infatuation with the lady in the portrait is the same starting point as Preminger's greatest movie, "Laura", and Otto ended up completing "Ermine" after Lubitsch's sudden death at the age of 55.