A Film Canon

This delightful parody of the middle class' pretensions to aristocracy turns on Miss Quaker's (Ossi Oswald) search for a suitor, conducted as a sustained act of consumption ("An hour and a half have passed, and I still haven't got a husband"), itself explicated as so many wanton, indiscriminate acts of destruction ("Why are you throwing those newspapers?" "Because all the vases are broken"). Not only does this completely emasculate her prospective partner, but it provides Lubitsch with the pretext to elaborate a world founded on ridiculous ceremony, all of which tends to centre on Miss Quaker's father, an oyster tycoon (Victor Janson), frankly presented as an African lord, or even gorilla, surrounded by a host of faithful African-American servants, and inspiring a household of more general staff that move in hyperactive, eccentric tandem, accentuated by Lubitsch's use of hyperbolic, grid-like symmetries, deep sets and, above all, an extraordinary command of crowd choreography, to the extent that the entire film is effectively danced, culminating with a "foxtrot epidemic" that breaks out over the entire mansion, clarifying that, even at the pinnacle of their extravagant self-realisation, the middle-class are still espousing a world of disembodied arms, legs and, with a wryness typical of Lubitsch, other extremities.