The Oyster Princess - Wellington Film Society

The Oyster Princess [Die Austernprinzessin] Ernst Lubitsch | Germany | 1919 | G
Preceeded by I Don’t Want to Be a Man [Ich möchte kein Mann sein] Ernst Lubitsch | Germany | 1919 | PG
Two silent films courtesy of the Goethe Institut.
Accompaniment by Adrianne Roberts.
Piano courtesy the NZ Film Archive and Friends of the Film Archive.

I Don’t Want to Be a Man is a wonderful and eye-opening early comedy of sexual identity; in addition to showcasing Lubitsch’s witty direction of actors and predilection for risqué situations, it also shows how early on the director developed milieu as a comic and dramatic force. Tomboy Ossi Oswalda, who boldly indulges in drinking, smoking, playing poker, and similar unladylike activities, is placed in the care of a male guardian who vows to ‘cut her down to size’. Chafing under his reign, she decides to go all out and live like a man, in convincing drag; the two ‘men’ smoke cigars, drink, and wind up a little too cozy in the back seat of a cab.

The Oyster Princess is a witty satire on moneyed Americans abroad as well as on the Prussian aristocracy, an American oyster maven promises to buy his daughter (Ossi Oswalda, the "German Mary Pickford") a prince of her very own; the victim recommended by their marriage broker is one down-and-out Prince Nucki, whose bald friend Josef is mistaken for the prince and, eventually, the groom in one of the most lavish weddings ever filmed. The sequence of preparations for the wedding, the whole house consumed with ‘fox-trot fever’, is an example of Lubitsch's skill in constructing a musical sequence without benefit of soundtrack.

- Pacific Film Archive

Event listed by Wellington Film Society

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