Kohlhiesels Töchter

This article is a reworking of an earlier article in Issue 56 of Senses of Cinema that discusses both Kohlhiesels Töchter and Schuhpalast Pinkus (1916).

Ernst Lubitsch’s meteoric German career spanned ten years, with him acting in about a dozen films before directing several dozen shorts and twelve features. The shorts Lubitsch featured in or directed were mainly comedies or parodies, while his features alternated between comedies and historical melodramas. Lubitsch’s career in Hollywood would last 24 years, during which he made ten silent and seventeen sound features as well as produced several additional films at Paramount Studios while he was Head of Production. Lubitsch was a prolific filmmaker and a workaholic.

Lubitsch (1892-1947) was born the son of a Berlin draper, and it had been expected that he would continue in his father’s business (he did work as an assistant in his father’s shop). Lubitsch, however, had other plans; he wished to become a theatre actor and joined Max Reinhardt’s theatre company in Berlin in 1911, playing, amongst other parts, those of the Second Gravedigger in Hamlet, and the roles of Wagner and Famulus in Faust. His most important role, however, was as Yeggar, the tragic hunchback clown in Friedrich Freska’s stage pantomime Sumurun, a work which Lubitsch would later revisit as his acting swan song for his film version of the play. It was while under the tutelage of Reinhardt that Lubitsch developed an appreciation of performance and acquired his ability to stage large crowd scenes. This influence is best demonstrated by the staging of the director’s historical epics and the vibrant dancehall and nightclub scenes that mark many of his silent movies (such as that found in So This is Paris, 1926). The latter are often remarkable for their ability to create the illusion of sound. He also built a strong ensemble of performers around him, including Emil Jannings during his time with Reinhardt.

Lubitsch, like many other theatrical performers in Germany and the United States, supplemented his meagre income by taking film work (as an actor and stagehand). The theatre had the prestige, but the movies paid the money. Lubitsch quit the theatre in 1913 to pursue an acting career in movies, taking the lead role in just his third film. This quickly led to Lubitsch’s first important role in Die Firma Heiratet (The Firm Weds, 1914), and then his most successful performance in its sequel, Der Stolz der Firma (The Pride of the Firm, 1914). Paradoxically, this success caused Lubitsch to be typecast. To broaden his appeal, he decided to write different roles for himself and sold these to the producer Paul Davidson, in whose films he had regularly featured. Lubitsch was now permitted to direct, and slowly his reputation as a director grew.

By 1919, Lubitsch had no rivals, artistically or commercially. Fritz Lang and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau had just begun their directorial careers and, technically, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1920) was years behind Lubitsch’s films. That year Lubitsch produced three hugely successful features – Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess), Madame Dubarry, and Die Puppe (The Doll). As a reward he was given carte blanche by the Ufa production heads and decided to revisit the terrain of his early comedies with Kohlhiesels Töchter (Kohlhiesel’s Daughters, 1920).

Kohlhiesels Töchter sticks to the formula of Lubitsch’s earlier comedies. The film was made for a mass audience and will be unfamiliar to those only acquainted with Lubitsch’s sophisticated comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. Lubitsch’s early films were a product of their era, addressing the audience’s senses and emotions. The humour is broad, slapstick and populist, and as unsubtle as the contemporaneous films Buster Keaton made with Fatty Arbuckle. 

The film is a reworking of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew set in the Bavarian Alps. The film utilises the play’s main conceits: Peter Xaver (Emil Jannings), a love-struck hulk cannot marry Gretel (Henny Porten) until her older ill-tempered sister (Liesel, also Porten) is married. This plot follows an old Teutonic (and Jewish) tradition and allows Lubitsch to have loads of fun playing with Bavarian caricatures. The characters are dim-witted (already apparent in the opening scene) and arrogant. Gretel wears dirndls (a traditional Bavarian costume, the female equivalent of lederhosen) throughout the film and there is a beer hall scene and sausage eating as well. As the film was shot on location, glistening alpine peaks complete the overriding sense of cliché.

As was Lubitsch’s method, he assembled his usual crew for Kohlhiesels Töchter, including scriptwriter Hanns Kräly and cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl. Kräly began working with Lubitsch as a scriptwriter in 1915 and would continue to write for Lubitsch in Hollywood up till the end of the silent era. Thereafter he continued working in Hollywood until 1943 but never again achieved the career success he had with Lubitsch. Sparkuhl too, began his association with Lubitsch in 1916 and it continued until Die Flamme (The Flame) in 1923, the director’s final German film. With the coming of sound, Sparkuhl worked in the United Kingdom and France (most notably on Renoir’s La Chienne [1931]), before moving to the United States where he worked continuously until 1946. The male lead of the film was given to Jannings, Lubitsch’s long-time friend, an actor who had already appeared in several of the director’s films, most importantly as Louis XV in Madame Dubarry. Henny Porten played the film’s female lead. Porten appeared in the title role of Lubitsch’s subsequent Anna Boleyn (1920) and went on to have a 50-year career in the movies.

The performances in Kohlhiesels Töchter are huge and coarse, not unlike those found in Tex Avery’s cartoons, and so apt for a slapstick comedy, especially one dealing with Bavarian yokels. Jennings, with frequently over-caked, theatrical makeup, appears as an expansive bully who chomps through cigars. He is also rude to a group of young women who want to dance and threatens to break his friend’s bones when he sees him as a potential rival for Gretel’s affection. When Xaver dances with Gretel at the beer hall the oversized performances and egos push everyone else off the dance floor, and spectators are left cowering at the edge of the frame. But Porten is the revelation of the film in the double role of the sisters. She even appears simultaneously on screen a couple of times, thanks to the wonders of trick photography. But the disparity of these performances means that it is almost a shock to discover that it is the same actress playing both roles. As Gretel, Porten is graceful, ornate and impulsive, albeit vain and dumb. As Liesel she “lets rip”, wears no (or little) make-up, wears her hair in a pointy bun, and swaggers around like an uncoordinated farmhand. She is uncouth and rude, throwing her arms around wildly and eating with her mouth open. She’s a lot of fun. Initially the role of Gretel was much larger than that of Liesel, but once Lubitsch saw the rushes he realised he needed to expand the latter role at the expense of Gretel.

As with many of Lubitsch’s films, the opening sets the tone. The scene beautifully differentiates the two sisters when individually confronted by a Yiddish hawker selling trinkets. Young Gretel is fooled by his salesmanship and buys a cheap brooch. Liesel, on the other hand, won’t stand for any of his nonsense and throws him out. The scene nicely illustrates the strong visual and physical humour of early Lubitsch, as well as his ongoing fascination with language. In his Hollywood films, Lubitsch was able to subvert the Production Code through the clever use of language. In the early silent films, Lubitsch frequently used slang (in the intertitles), especially Yiddish, but here he also incorporates some Bavarian colloquialisms. The characters nevertheless display their foibles, dreams and weaknesses, as in his later films. With other directors the characters would be damned for their shortcomings, however, we know from the beginning that the conflict in the film will be resolved with minimal adverse consequences for the protagonists. Lubitsch’s films are ultimately optimistic and he never passes judgement on these fallible humans. For Lubitsch love is never exclusive and it usually favours those who least deserve it. Kohlhiesels Töchter was Lubitsch’s greatest German success and was remade at least three times in 1930 (with Porten producing), 1943 and 1962. It remained one of Lubitsch’s favourite German comedies. He quickly followed up its success with another comedy based on Shakespeare and filmed on location in Bavaria, Romeo und Julia im Schnee (Romeo and Juliet in the Snow, 1920).

About the music

The Melbourne Cinémathèque will be presenting the new 4K restoration by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation that premiered at the Berlinale on February 18 of this year, with a new score by Diego Ramos Rodriguez. The new film music by Diego Ramos Rodríguez for salon orchestra uses motifs from a historical film score from Kohlhiesels Töchter, a potpourri by Giuseppe Becce of folk music and operetta hits from 1920. Diego Ramos composed his music on the metric basis of waltzes, Ländlers and polkas, which he continues and satirizes in the instrumentation, the timbres of folk music are transposed onto classical concert instruments. His music accompanies the film with musical wit and ambiguous quotations; it conveys historical film music practice with modern composition techniques and invites you to rediscover Lubitsch’s silent film classic.

Kohlhiesels Töchter (1920 Germany 64 mins)

Prod Co: Messter Film Dir: Ernst Lubitsch Scr: Hanns Kräly, Ernst Lubitsch, from a story by Friedrich Raff and Julius Urgiss Phot: Theodor Sparkuhl Art Dir: Jack Winter, Hans Baluschek (uncredited) Cos Des: Jan Baluschek

Cast: Emil Jannings, Henny Porten, Gustav von Wangenheim, Jakob Tiedtke, Willi Prager