The Doll

Ernst Lubitsch assembles his toy-box fantasy just ahead of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, surely Kracauer laughed his ass off. The storybook village is a painted set, the roads are so slanted that the timid protagonist (Hermann Thimig) slips and falls right into a square-shaped pond. (He climbs out dripping and prays for some sunshine, cardboard clouds part and steam rises from his jacket.) His uncle the Baron (Max Kronert) plans an arranged marriage but he will have none of it, forty grinning brides occupy the plaza (cf. Keaton's Seven Chances) and chase him into a monastery, where cheerfully gluttonous monks offer him dry bread: "Feast, my son. We like to share, but not too much." The dilemma is resolved by a button-operated mechanical doll created by Hilarius the toymaker (Victor Janson), just the thing for "bachelors, widowers and misogynists." When the replicant faulters, the inventor's daughter (Ossi Oswalda) takes its place to extend the spiky view of marriage as ownership. ("Must be a screw loose," one bloke concludes when she rejects docility.) Oswalda's stiff-legged gait and jerky pirouettes are lovely sketches for Lang's Evil Maria, the ruse is splendidly sustained through an enchanted mise en scène—cutouts of cats and roosters and a winking moon to punctuate the fable, the tail falls off the horse costume pulling the carriage so the coachman calmly picks it back up. Manual and oil can for the honeymoon, "o ye hyenas of lust," Lubitsch with Offenbach and Méliès at his fingertips. On to Buñuel (Ensayo de un Crimen) and Fellini (Casanova) it ripples. In black and white.