Made during the most prolific year of Lubitsch’s career while still in Germany, The Oyster Princess marked a new direction for the director’s work in comedy—away from slapstick and toward a more sophisticated form of satire. Here the target of his humor is the American bourgeoisie, personified by a wealthy businessman, the “oyster king,” who is ensconced in a European villa filled with servants and assistants. Material wealth, however, is insufficient to satisfy the ambitions of these Americans, and the businessman’s daughter, having read of the marriage of the “shoe-polish princess” to a nobleman, begs her father to buy her a prince. The ensuing tale manages to wring humor from both the boundless hubris of the Americans and the haughty attitudes of a European aristocracy now fallen on hard times.

Despite historian Siegfried Kracauer’s pithy critique of this film (“the story’s contempt for historic facts is matched only by its disregard for their meaning”), Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry was the film that ended the American embargo on German cinema following World War I and, as such, launched a “German invasion” that would radically transform American movie-making. Retitled Passion to bolster its star’s appeal, the film focuses on the romantic and political intrigues that reverberated throughout the court of Louis XV and reimagines the origins of the French Revolution in the libidinous shifts of fortune of Madame Dubarry (Negri), mistress to the king. What Lubitsch sacrificed in authenticity, he readily made up for in spectacle—with his stunning sets, elaborate costumes and props, and leviathan crowd scenes replete with 5,000 extras.