Lubitsch’s ‘The Oyster Princess’ or — Aphrodisiac Cinema?
It’s not just that Ernst Lubitsch’s ‘The Oyster Princess’ (1919) is funny but that it’s relentlessly funny, almost threatening to burst out of the screen and bring its mayhem into your physical reality leaving you wondering why you have hundreds of strangers in your home and all your furniture is now lying in bits
Spoilt brat Ossi Quaker (Ossi Oswalda) is daughter to a rich father and heiress to his oyster fortune. She has everything she could want apart from a husband and she wants one and she wants one now and he has to be a prince, or she’ll keep destroying her room. Her father agrees and arranges for her to be married to Prince Nucki, making Ossi so delighted she could smash-up the rest of her room in happiness.
However, Prince Nucki is marriage-phobic and wants to make sure that his bride-to-be isn’t some lunatic so he sends his manservant in his place so he can report back to the prince. Unfortunately things don’t quite go according to plan and it’s not long before a marriage is taking place. But just who, exactly, is getting married?!
‘The Oyster Princess’ is out of control and wildly irrational, so basically an accurate depiction of love, sex and human behaviour then. But isn’t that also why desire is so wonderful? Besides, flirting requires emotional intelligence and an awareness of another person’s needs and passions and Lubtisch knows exactly how far to push things before events get too crazy, even if the answer is “as far as he possibly can and then some”.
For example, there’s a moment during the wedding celebrations where that most terrifying of occurrences takes place — a dreaded ‘foxtrot epidemic’! Suddenly everyone, including the servants, is swept up into the maelstrom and crazily dancing throughout the entire mansion, the physical boundaries of which haven’t quite been defined in physical reality, as the orchestra spreads the virus wider, the bandleader frantically urging them on to the point of self-combustion.
The only thing more wonderful to behold is, as usual, Ossi Oswalda who is as good, if not better, here than in Lubitsch’s ‘I Don’t Want To Be a Man’ (1918) and ‘The Doll’ (1919), and that’s saying something. Everything she does — every look, move, glance and smile — is bursting with an alert comedic intelligence, and I can’t think of anyone else who made being bonkers look so pretty.
Then there’s the directing with Lubtisch cramming almost every second of screen-time with a gag or a piece of business and all handled, both by him and the actors, with total precision. There’s a wonderful moment where the Prince and his friends drunkenly walk through a park and each one of the group, in turn, flops out on a bench. It’s not only funny but takes a second or two to notice what’s going on and leaving, at the end, an image of beautiful composition.
‘The Oyster Princess’ is a joy and Lubitsch, once again, reminds us of a very important truth — that human beings have always, deep down, been very silly creatures.
