How Would Lubitsch Do It S3E09 - Eternal Love (1929) with Bram Ruiter
• In our Season 3 finale, returning guest Bram Ruiter joins us to discuss the final film Ernst Lubitsch ever directed that didn’t involved on-set sound recording: ETERNAL LOVE! We discuss the film’s unusual status as a hybrid silent/sound picture, the strange story of how this film was lost and then discovered, John Barrymore’s dipsomaniacal tendencies, and the film’s terrific ending amidst long tangents in which break…
● THE PATRIOT is a lost film. So, we begin with a dramatic reading of the only surviving synopsis of the film before returning guest David Cairns joins us to pick up the pieces and discuss the film’s connections to acclaimed studio rebel Josef Von Sternberg! We discuss THE SCARLET EMPRESS, THE LAST COMMAND, DISHONORED, THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN, BLONDE VENUS, SHANGHAI EXPRESS, and Sternberg’s habit of burning every bridge available to him.
• Why, this has everything anyone could want in a '32 pre-code. Women of the night! Eat-the-rich populism! Hardcore lingerie! Casual racism! Grandma insurrection! *Checks notes* W.C. Fields starting a Mad Max gang!
• Tag Gallagher's indelible characterisation of John Ford's segment of HOW THE WEST WAS WON as "so much bad disco momentarily ceasing for the St. Matthew Passion's final funereal chorus" is, I would argue, equally applicable to Lubitsch's contribution here. THE CLERK is the closest thing he ever made to a concise mission statement, and every one of its 110 seconds is perfect.
tfw that time you comically exclaimed "OH SHIT!!!" whilst filming a local riot on your dinky 2011 DSLR gets immortalized in a feature-length documentary.
OPENING CREDITS:
Based on Albert S. Ruddy's experience of making the Godfather.
• One of the most unfocused, hagiographic, self-indulgent pieces of cinematic autofellatio I've ever seen. It's 600* minutes of unmitigated accidental cringe comedy. Five stars.
• There's just straight-up too much to talk about here. I don't even know where to begin.
• Matthew Goode's work as Robert Evans is actively fucking great. Maybe I'm overrating him here because he's thrown into relief against the catastrophic incompetence that…
He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.
• I try my damndest not to…
