The Lubitsch Touch - 3 Quarks Daily

David Hudson at The Current:

The 2026 version of The Lubitsch Touch isn’t quite as expansive as the one New York’s Film Forum presented in 2017, but it is certainly just as welcome. Writing in the Village Voice nine years ago, Farran Smith Nehme noted that “the Lubitsch touch” was “the brainchild of a go-getter in the Warner Bros. publicity department named Hal Wallis, when Ernst Lubitsch was under contract at the studio in the 1920s. Thus did future producer Wallis invent one of the few PR slogans ever to be turned by critics into a philosophical debate, to be defined and redefined ever since. On the simplest level, I’d agree with Armond White that the touch was sophistication. You may favor a mistier, more metaphysical definition,” but “we all know the touch when we see it.”

“The phrase hovers over the filmmaker like a halo,” wrote Siri Hustvedt in her 2019 essay on Lubitsch’s final completed feature, Cluny Brown (1947). “It appears to be a quality of visual and verbal grace that cannot be reduced to any particular aspect of production. As far as I can tell, no writer has mentioned that, whatever it means, it summons the tactile sense, what is never present for any moviegoer except by imagination. Lubitsch loved to evoke that missing sensual element by suggestion—especially the play and pleasure of human sexuality.”

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