Saturday, June 10, 2017

Lubitsch's Angel, 1978

I wrote this paper on Ernst Lubitsch's 1937 Angel when I was 22 years old, for a 1978 Steve Mamber class at UCLA. As usual with my early film writing, I'm embarrassed by the paper's youthful arrogance and excessive zeal for categorization. But the current Lubitsch retrospective at Film Forum prompted some friends to ask me for writing on Angel (one of my very favorite films), and I'll never have the chance to go into this much detail again. Below are scans of the original paper, with some of Steve's sensible criticisms still visible. I took the liberty of omitting a useless introductory paragraph.