When I Was Dead / The Pride of the Firm

Monday | July 10, 2017 7:00 pm

When I Was Dead

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

The Pride of the Firm

Directed by Carl Wilhelm

Live Musical Accompaniment by Robert Humphreville
Screening on Film

When I Was Dead (Als ich tot war)

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch.
With Ernst Lubitsch, Helene Voß, Louise Schenrich.
Germany, 1916, DCP, black & white, silent, 40 min.
German intertitles with English subtitles.
DCP source: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung

Starring Lubitsch himself in the lead role, this marital farce unfolds at a breathtaking pace. He plays a young husband who, after a long night out playing chess, is kicked out by his wife and her unpleasant mother. Assumed dead after the discovery of a suicide note, he reappears in disguise when his mother-in-law and “widow” hire a new butler. Though rudimentary compared to the marriage comedies he would make in even just a few years, When I Was Dead is now treasured as one of Lubitsch’s earliest extant works. It was believed to be a lost film until, in 1994, a print was found at the Slovenian Cinematheque in Ljubljana.

The Pride of the Firm (Der Stolz der Firma)

Directed by Carl Wilhelm.
With Ernst Lubitsch, Martha Kriwitz, Victor Arnold.
Germany, 1914, 35mm, black & white, silent, 45 min.
German intertitles with English subtitles.
Print source: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung

While Lubitsch’s first screen appearance in the hit comedy The Perfect Sixty-Six (1914) is unfortunately lost, his second collaboration with director Carl Wilhelm survived. The quickly made sequel—subtitled The Story of an Apprentice—develops a screen persona that made Lubitsch as popular in Germany as Max Linder in France or Harold Lloyd in the US: his presumably Jewish antihero, a country boy, rises to success in the big city—usually by marrying the daughter of the clothing store owner. Notable in The Pride of the Firm is the before-and-after shot wherein the old and the new Siegmund Lachmann—the country boy and the suave businessman—are both greeting and talking to the audience.