About Ernst Lubitsch

To describe romance in film before Lubitsch, one might as well describe Ellis Island without mentioning the Statue of Liberty. Not because he was the purest romanticist. But because he defined all the grey that makes up the singular act of emotion towards the opposite sex (conceivably the same sex, too). Chevalier in the close of Love Parade is as cruel as any person ever put on screen. Lubitsch knows; the only emotions left when one's love is drying up are dark and terrible. To be able to show them with such subtlety that they're almost completely ignored for 80 years (indeed, that they even get called light and effervescent, sparkling with chemistry)... The tell-tale sign of art's greatest masters.