The Merry Jail / Romeo and Juliet in the Snow

Sunday | August 20, 2017 7:00 pm

The Merry Jail

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

Romeo and Juliet in the Snow

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

Live Musical Accompaniment by Robert Humphreville
Screening on Film

The Merry Jail (Das fidele Gefängnis)

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch.
With Harry Liedtke, Kitty Dewall, Emil Jannings.
Germany, 1917, 35mm, black & white, silent, 48 min.
German intertitles with English subtitles.
Print source: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung

Yet another charming three-reel comedy and again a farce on marriage, desire and social and sexual role-play, The Merry Jailanticipates Lubitsch’s more sophisticated comedies of manners such as The Marriage Circle and Trouble in Paradise. A loose adaptation of the Johann Strauss II operetta Die Fledermaus, the film revolves around marital, and possibly extramarital, antics, with identity switching and traded places reminiscent of So This is Paris. Playing the husband, Harry Liedtke became a Lubitsch regular after this, while Emil Jannings—who plays the prison director—would become Lubitsch’s cinematic alter ego.

Romeo and Juliet in the Snow (Romeo und Julia im Schnee)

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch.
With Gustav von Wangenheim, Lotte Neumann, Jakob Tiedtke.
Germany, 1920, 35mm, black & white, silent, 45 min.
German intertitles with English subtitles.

Lubitsch’s second “winter film” premiered only three days after Kohlhiesel’s Daughters, yet did not enjoy the success of its predecessor—not because Lubitsch transformed the Shakespearian tragedy into a Black Forest comedy, but because of history, namely the attempted coup–the Kapp Putsch–in Berlin that eclipsed all other news. The Shakespeare-inspired farce set in a Swabian village opens with two feuding families, the Capulethofers and the Montekugerls. Both are seeking a resolution to a dispute. While the parents are outraged over the judge’s verdict—determined with sausages on either side of the scale of justice—that neither is wrong nor right, the kids fall in love. Luckily for this Romeo and Juliet, the poison in Lubitsch’s farce turns out to be something much sweeter.