The German-American film director Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) is recognized as one of the comic masters of the cinema. A brilliant craftsman, he is chiefly admired for his witty political satires and inventive bedroom farces. Ernst Lubitsch was the son...

Film director, actor, and producer Ernst Lubitsch rose to fame in the 1910s in Germany, and emigrated to Hollywood in 1929. In the United States his sophisticated comedies were highly successful, and he was made director of production at Paramount in...

Ernst Lubitsch (January 28, 1892 – November 30, 1947), was a German-born Jewish film director. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were...

SHOOT THE WIDOW: ADVENTURES OF A BIOGRAPHER IN SEARCH OF HER SUBJECTBy Meryle SecrestAlfred A. Knopf, 242 pages, $25.95 Biography is the perfect occupation for the scholar-squirrel, assiduously storing lists of the guests at every dinner party, the word count of every...

Darryl Zanuck loved the story but hated the choice of writer-director-an "arrogant bastard" with "four flops" to his name already, as he blustered to the producer, Sol C. Siegel. Zanuck wanted Ernst Lubitsch for the job, but Lubitsch already had three heart attacks to his...

Danièle Thompson’s Avenue Montaigne (Fauteuils d’Orchestre), from a screenplay by Ms. Thompson and her son, Christopher Thompson (in French with English subtitles), plays out as a perky Parisian Right Bank boulevard comedy with more than the usual traumatically life-altering situations among the self-consciously arty types...

Lasse Hallström’s The Hoax, from a screenplay by William Wheeler, is based in part on Clifford Irving’s own confessional account (also entitled The Hoax) of his real-life 70’s scam at the expense of his credulous publisher, McGraw-Hill. Mr. Wheeler has added some fictional embroidery to...