When Lubitsch arrived, however, things started to change. He brought European sophistication, candor in sexuality and an oblique style that made audiences complicit with the characters and situations. This light, insouciant, teasing manner became known far and wide as “the Lubitsch Touch.” By the end of the 20’s and throughout his short life—he died in 1947 at age 55—Lubitsch was probably the most famous film director internationally, except perhaps for C. B. DeMille. Today hardly anyone remembers either one of them. Yet while most of DeMille is pretty forgettable, if sometimes fun, Lubitsch is always fun and often as good as it gets.

Recently, a number of now fairly obscure Lubitsch films have been released on DVD, so maybe there’s hope. If you want to see just exactly how dumbed-down our society and culture have become, take a look at Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932), out on the Criterion Collection. This airy, witty, blatantly amoral sex comedy about a couple of amorous jewel thieves was in its time a successful mainstream picture, hard as that may be to believe these days. But then in the 1930’s, films were being made by adults for adults, even after the Production Code kicked in around 1934.

Trouble begins in Venice, and its brilliant screenwriter Samson Raphaelson (who did numerous films with Lubitsch) told me once that he and the director spent over a week trying to come up with a good opening to establish the location as Venice: “Ernst wasn’t satisfied with just a shot of the canals or something,” and he wouldn’t go forward until they had solved the beginning. Finally, Lubitsch came up with it: Fade in on a shot of a back door to a building at night, a dog sniffing around a garbage can. A heavyset man enters the frame, picks up the can and carries it off as we PAN to see him dump the contents into a gondola filled with garbage on a darkened canal; he gets in his craft and, as he oars away, starts to sing, “O Solo Mio.” That was the Lubitsch touch.

This was the same picturemaker for whom Garbo laughed in the irresistible Ninotchka (1939), and Jimmy Stewart lifted his trousers to show that he wasn’t bowlegged at the conclusion of The Shop Around the Corner (1940), probably the warmest, most human romantic comedy ever made. Lubitsch was the fellow with the moxie to laugh at the Nazis right in the midst of World War II, typified by Jack Benny’s infamous line from To Be or Not to Be (1942): “So they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt!” And he was the one to elicit Don Ameche’s single great performance in that beautiful period comedy about an unremarkable man’s love life, Heaven Can Wait (1943). All these acknowledged classics are currently available on DVD. (Also available is a rare Lubitsch flop, his last silent, Eternal Love (1929), a tragic love story with a brilliant performance by John Barrymore, and directed with all the economical precision and emotional depth of Lubitsch at his best.)

Although in the talking era he made virtually all comedies, Lubitsch had pioneered intimate costume dramas in the teens and 1920’s: His first international successes were Madame DuBarry (1919) and Anna Boleyn (1920; originally titled Deception in the U.S.), both of which dealt with historical figures in a candid, mostly-warts fashion that American audiences were not accustomed to. Kino has just released DVD’s of Anna Boleyn, with a devastating performance by Emil Jannings as the sexually rapacious Henry VIII, as well as another popular epic, Sumurun (1920; first U.S. title was One Arabian Night), in which Lubitsch himself has a sizable role opposite his star Pola Negri. (Orson Welles told me that when he first came to Hollywood, one trade term for a close-up was “big head of Pola,” a phrase of Lubitsch’s when he was directing Negri in America.) Of course, Lubitsch himself started out as an actor in silent comedy two-reelers, playing Jewish merchants with gusto and perfect timing.

Indeed, Lubitsch was well known in the business for giving his actors extremely precise instructions on how to play their roles. I once asked Jack Benny if it was true that Lubitsch acted out all the parts for his cast, and Jack confirmed it. Was he any good? I asked, and Jack answered, “Well, he was a little broad—but you got the idea!” This addresses the question of why all the actors in Lubitsch movies have such a very particular style, unlike the way they are in any other picture, be they as disparate as Gary Cooper, Don Ameche, Maurice Chevalier or Herbert Marshall. Signe Hasso, who played the French maid in Heaven Can Wait, told me that Lubitsch—who was short, heavyset, with a thick German accent and always sporting a cigar—had shown her exactly how to play the maid, and that he was just terrific at it, too.

The silent German comedies Kino has released—The Wildcat (1921), The Doll (1919), The Oyster Princess (1919), I Don’t Want to Be a Man (1920)—are all fast-paced in a farce mode, often extremely funny, but not really typical of the understated Lubitsch comic touch that sprang full-grown with his second American film and first drawing-room/bedroom romantic comedy, The Marriage Circle (1924; released on DVD by Image Entertainment). With this film, an unqualified and undated masterpiece of infidelity and misunderstanding, Lubitsch became, as his biographer Scott Eyman put it (in Laughter in Paradise), “the composer of the cinema’s finest, most elegant chamber music.”

Speaking of music, bear in mind that Lubitsch also made the first great screen musicals, including the very first all-talking, all-dancing, all-singing, fully plotted musical-comedy in American picture history, The Love Parade (1929), starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, both brand-new to movies. Parade is one of four musicals just recently released on DVD by the Eclipse (budget) division of the Criterion Collection—under the comprehensive title, Lubitsch Musicals—and each of them is pure gold. I have to admit that these are—along with Lubitsch’s last and best musical, The Merry Widow (1934; currently not available on DVD except in a Japanese edition, which can be played here only on all-region machines)—among my favorite movies of all time. There is an innocence and a sophistication combined that is enchanting, a sense both of mockery and celebration that is at once very funny and strangely touching.

In four short years, Lubitsch and his talented collaborators put together four complete book musicals, all with original songs, all sung live during shooting, with the orchestra right off camera. This was before sound mixing was possible, or playback, so everything had to happen at once. (I remember Hitchcock telling me about shoot
ing an insert of a radio in the same period, and having to have a full orchestra off-camera to play the music supposedly just coming from the radio.) However, singing live that way gives these early musicals a remarkable immediacy, a spontaneous freshness that doesn’t date. Chevalier and Macdonald (and in Parade the legendary second bananas Lillian Roth and Lupino Lane) are really singing right there and then.

After The Love Parade, there was Monte Carlo (1930), with MacDonald and the English music-hall star, Jack Buchanan; followed by the bittersweet The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), with Chevalier, Claudette Colbert and Miriam Hopkins; and finally One Hour With You (1932), again with Chevalier and MacDonald, a musical version of The Marriage Circle and in its own special way just as delectable. Lubitsch’s superb way of shooting those films gave nobility to the new art of talking pictures, and influenced everyone who followed. The Smiling Lieutenant is especially unorthodox in creating a triangle situation that does not have the happy ending the audience would prefer.

In both The Love Parade and One Hour With You, Chevalier actually speaks directly to the camera a few times, daringly breaking the fourth wall in a way that no one was ever quite able to do as well again. For the Best Picture-winning Gigi (1958), Vincente Minnelli and Alan Jay Lerner brought Chevalier back to America, and in an homage to Lubitsch, had him address the audience (“Thank Heaven for Little Girls”) just as he had done 30 years before (though this time he was lip-synching to playback, and often not very precisely). Minnelli had remembered Lubitsch before: When making his terrific The Band Wagon (1953), he brought Jack Buchanan to Hollywood for the first time since Lubitsch’s Monte Carlo, in which Buchanan is inordinately charming, and which features one of the most famous of early musical numbers—MacDonald on a train singing “Beyond the Blue Horizon” while passing farmers wave and join in with the syncopated sounds of the engine.

Both The Love Parade and The Smiling Lieutenant (and later, The Merry Widow) are Ruritanian romances, Chevalier being an officer from some mythical middle-European country. Monte Carlo begins in one and then shifts to the French Riviera. One Hour With You is set entirely in Paris, a favorite city of Lubitsch’s: One of his best silent comedies is So This Is Paris (1926), and The Merry Widow mostly plays there, too, as does Ninotchka and nearly all of Trouble in Paradise—though it is really a fantasy Paris. As Lubitsch famously said, “I have been to Paris, France, and I have been to Paris, Paramount. I think I prefer Paris, Paramount.” In other words, the places of his imagination—and indeed, it’s his very personal slant on everything that makes his pictures so intoxicating.

Naturally, all older films suffer from not being seen, as they were meant to be, on the big screen, which is probably one of the main reasons why younger people are so impatient with anything made earlier than about 1990. I was fortunate to have first seen these Lubitsch musicals in a large screening room at Paramount in the mid-1960’s when Jerry Lewis generously set me up to screen whatever studio prints I cared to run. I ran 82 movies, some in their original, gloriously shimmering nitrate prints. There is simply no substitute for that. We cinéastes of the 60’s used to scoff when someone said they had only seen a classic on TV: “Then you haven’t seen it,” we’d say. Now it’s all on TV, and there’s very little chance of viewing classics the way they were meant to be seen (Film Forum and MoMA are two New York oases).

Many films, therefore, are irreparably damaged and diminished. John Ford’s famous long shots, for example, lose all their majesty and impact. Howard Hawks’ comedy pacing becomes exhausting when you have to strain to see. Mythology, which is what pictures are at their best, by its very nature must be bigger than life, not smaller than life. Being overwhelmed by images in the dark is part of the basic magic of the medium. Take that away and you take away a good deal of the glory. At least if you’ve seen a picture the right way once, repeat viewings retain in memory a residual glow. But kids don’t have that, so to them it becomes perhaps just a charade they must strain to view, certainly not something that takes over.

In 1929, when Maurice Chevalier in The Love Parade sang to the audience—“Paris, Please Stay the Same” was his first number—he was bigger than he could be on any stage, and therefore proportionally all-powerful. Today, on DVD, unless you have a gigantic screen, he becomes maybe only a charming curiosity. I’ll take it, though, in place of most of what’s out there. It speaks of a simpler, more civilized era. The America that took Chevalier to its heart is definitively gone, too, of course, and only retrievable by an act of imagination. To see these Lubitsch musicals takes us back to a remarkably more innocent time, evoking a period when charm, wit and grace could rule, when an ineffably light touch could become famous and cherished the world over.

It's a shame, really, because Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett have good comic timing and chemistry together as veteran detective Joe Gavilan and rookie sidekick K.C. Calden. Beyond their big age difference, Joe and K.C. are polar opposites in lifestyles and moonlighting vocations. While the much-married and much-divorced older man is busy trying to get out from under ruinous multiple alimony payments and ill-advised real-estate investments, K.C. is a deceased cop's son with an affinity for acting and yoga instruction-both of which pastimes bring him in welcome proximity to hordes of pretty girls. At times, the one-liners on the subject exchanged between the two leads begin to acquire the tired sound of a sitcom audition.

Still, Hollywood Homicide does break new ground by injecting the pervasive homicidal feuds in the current rap-music genre into the LAPD-movie genre. The trouble is that Mr. Shelton and Mr. Souza don't do enough with the material to make it dramatically compelling. There is one promisingly cogent encounter between Mr. Ford's suspicious detective and Isaiah Washington's cool rap mogul, Saritain. But the aura of mysterious power that Saritain exudes in this scene is seriously diminished when he ends up behaving like a cheap, gun-happy thug on the run from the police.

Not that Joe and K.C. have an easy time of it, but their life-and-death struggles with Saritain and ex–rogue cop Leroy Wasley (Dwight Yoakam) are ridiculously prolonged and exaggerated, inasmuch as we can't be expected to worry that something really awful is going to happen to the two lead characters when they're written with an obtrusively humorous slant. Even when K.C. realizes that a criminal adversary is responsible for the murder of his own martyred father-cop, he comes out on top with the help of an elaborately farcical acting trick that further trivializes the already banal chase scenes preceding it. Actually, the pre-credit sequence-in which the four members of a hip-hop group performing in a club are assassinated-packs more cinematic dynamite than any of the action set-pieces that follow. But the skimpy methods employed by the detectives to solve the murders look feeble next to the various CSI and Law & Order genre powerhouses on television.

On the positive side are some very fresh and witty sex scenes between the aging detective, played by the equally aged Mr. Ford, and the radio mystic, Ruby, played by the ageless Lena Olin. Dare we use the ancient term "charm" to describe the sheer grown-up fun Joe and Ruby seem to be having as they beat back the usually merciless clock? By contrast, K.C.'s more frequent sexual experiences seem to be performed strictly by the numbers in between his own unfunny rehearsals for the Stanley Kowalski role in a pathetically undernourished production of A Streetcar Named Desire .

Among the compensating fringe benefits of this curiously unfocused production are Lolita Davidovich's hard-as-nails Hollywood madame, Cleo; Martin Landau's has-been producer, Jerry Duran, with a mansion to peddle for some hard cash; Gladys Knight as Olivia Robidoux, the hip mother of a key witness named K-Ro (Kurupt); Frank Sinatra Jr. as Marty Wheeler, the quintessential Hollywood lawyer adept at playing both sides against the middle; and Lou Diamond Phillips in an amusing turn as "Wanda," a transvestite undercover cop with the streetwalker's costume to prove it.

I can't help feeling that Mr. Shelton's potentially sophisticated take on the LAPD has been hijacked by the mercenary monolith (or matrix) manned by Hollywood's bottom-line suits, with instructions to load on the stunt men and car-crash special effects for the sake of the juvenile first-week audiences who need to be lured away from their video games. It's too bad. One expected more from the writer-director of such intelligent sports movies as Bull Durham (1988), White Men Can't Jump (1992) and Tin Cup (1996).

Aussie Conviction

Scott Roberts' The Hard Word , from his own screenplay, begins in an Australian prison. Dale (Guy Pearce), Mal (Damien Richardson), and Shane (Joel Edgerton) are three brothers waiting to be released after serving time for a series of masterful armed robberies in which no one ever got hurt-although their last robbery apparently wasn't masterful enough. No matter. Dale is both the oldest and smartest of the three brothers, as well as the acknowledged leader; Shane is the handsomest, the vainest and the most emotionally disturbed of the three; and Mal is peculiarly attuned to his culinary passion for meat and a post-crime desire to be a butcher.

These three fraternal felons seem to have it made in prison, with cushy quarters and easy jobs, thanks to the high-powered, well-connected conniving of their crooked defense lawyer, Frank Malone (Robert Taylor). Yet after having served their time, they find themselves compelled by Frank and his criminal confederates to pull off one last massive heist before they can retire from their lives of crime.

Dale and his brothers don't entirely trust Frank-partly because Dale suspects that his sexually provocative wife, Carol (Rachel Griffiths), has been having an affair with Frank while Dale has been away in prison. For her part, Carol is determined to follow the money in whatever man's bed it is located. Both Dale and Frank suspect her of being capable of betraying either of them at the first opportunity, but neither of them can avoid being manipulated by her, despite their suspicions. Dale's brothers urge him to dump her without any further ado, but he keeps hesitating until, in the end, she reveals herself as not so much the scarlet lady as, at heart, just one of the boys.

Producer Al Clark has described The Hard Word as akin to Michael Mann's Heat (1995), as imagined by the Coen Brothers. "And I was only being partly frivolous," Mr. Clark continued. "Because it actually describes the way I see it. Heat is fundamentally a film about relationships disguised as an action movie. So is ours, although with more deadpan comic spin and less elaborate set pieces. As for the Coens, they have an unblinking way of observing bizarre behavior. They won't let you look away. Neither do we."

That may be, but I warn my readers that the trans-Pacific cockney accent of the lowlife characters can make for some heavy going. The visual style is efficient enough, but the characterizations are so casually offhand that it's difficult to understand the motivations for their actions. In the big heist, the violence erupts so gratuitously, and the spatial coordinates are so confused, that I never figured out how the three brothers escaped with all the loot after being double-crossed.

The entire cast perform ably, but Mr. Pearce and Ms. Griffiths, one of the lingering revelations on the HBO series Six Feet Under , are something special in their native habitat. For her sensually goofy part, Ms. Griffiths apparently decided that only a blond-floozy bleach job could convey the mood she was seeking. Mr. Pearce seems to be returning to some bedrock realistic persona after a long holiday as a stylized character actor of sub–Russell Crowe dimensions. One thing The Hard Word cannot be accused of is committing the smug sociological assumption that crime doesn't pay-in Australia or anywhere else in this terminally corrupt world.

Euro Clash

Céric Klapisch's L'Auberge Espagnole , from his own screenplay, has been lingering in theaters hereabouts on the basis of generally favorable word-of-mouth. And it's worth catching on the big screen before it's relegated to the vaults, only to be rescued by the benign forces of VHS and DVD. For one thing, it's the first film I know of from anywhere that makes fun of the European Union as a new monster of standardization threatening the rich varieties of European culture. For another, it features four of the most erotically and emotionally delectable female performances I have seen in one film this year.

The hero and, at times, the anti-hero of the film is Xavier (Romaine Duris), a French exchange student in a special E.U. program in Barcelona for budding bureaucrats from many different countries. As Xavier tries to find his way in Barcelona, he answers an advertisement placed by a multilingual group of international students seeking an additional tenant to help pay the enormous rent on their apartment.

Xavier has maintained contact with his first but not lasting love, Martine (Audrey Tautou). At school, Xavier befriends a lesbian confidante who advises him on how to seduce Anne-Sophie (Judith Godrèche), a susceptible married young woman bored by the neglect of her workaholic surgeon husband-who happens to have been Xavier's first benefactor in Barcelona. Wendy (Kelly Reilly), a feisty British girl, rounds out the gallery of enchanting females with whom Xavier connects, either erotically or platonically, in the process of finding a place and a career (though not a woman) to which he can belong whole-heartedly. Is this a wish-fulfillment fantasy? Of course- but it's a lot of fun, nonetheless.

The Lubitsch Decree

Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939) will be shown on June 20 and 21 at the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street. Screening times are at 1, 5:10 and 9:20 p.m. If you've never seen this Greta Garbo classic-or even if you have-you shouldn't miss this opportunity to witness one of the most luminously comic-romantic performances in the history of the cinema. As an added dividend, you might want to take another look at a movie criticized at the time by leftists for making fun of housing conditions, the Moscow show trials and the fear of being reported to the secret police in Joseph Stalin's glorious Soviet Union (at least according to Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize–winning dispatches from Moscow earlier that decade). But then as now, the ineffable Garbo under Lubitsch's direction is the main show.

Heaven Can Wait (1943) is one of Lubitsch's warmest and most underrated masterpieces, and will be shown on Sunday, June 22, at 1:05, 5:05 and 8:55 p.m. On Monday and Tuesday, it will be shown only at matinees at 1:05 and 5:05 p.m. Don't get me wrong. If I were temporarily made ruler of the universe (like Jim Carrey in Bruce Almighty ), I would decree that all my readers would be obliged to see all 34 Lubitsch works in this marvelous Film Forum retrospective. ( Cluny Brown (1946), with Jennifer Jones and Charles Boyer, is another Lubitsch treasure.) But being, instead, a reasonably rational reviewer, I shall stick to the high points. This is not the Warren Beatty Heaven Can Wait (1978), which was based on Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941). Lubitsch's Heaven features Don Ameche and Gene Tierney in one of her most enchanting and most vulnerable incarnations.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find myself somewhat enjoying a crowded daytime showing of this latest Jim Carrey vehicle at my local multiplex. One might suspect that by expecting nothing (I had read the mostly tepid reviews before venturing into the theater), I was overjoyed to find a little something. And perhaps I'd felt an atavistic desire to return to the moviegoing herd I had long ago abandoned to become an arbiter of what is worth seeing and what is plainly not.

For Mr. Carrey, however, Bruce Almighty marked a career-boosting, if not a career-saving, comeback after his unsuccessful efforts to out-Capra Frank Capra and out-Stewart Jimmy Stewart in his previous ill-fated vehicle, The Majestic (2001), in which the 1950's Hollywood blacklist is denounced at great length with emotionally hollow hysteria. After The Majestic , word spread around Hollywood that Mr. Carrey-like Robin Williams before him-felt too significantly talented to avail his comic genius simply to make audiences laugh their heads off.

Of course, one cannot fault Messrs. Carrey and Williams for following the middlebrow industry dictate that comedy-and especially farce-is not to be taken as seriously as "socially significant" drama. (The annual Oscar nominations prove my case.) In Bruce Almighty, Mr. Carrey returns to his comic roots with Mr. Shadyac, his director in the dangerously silly Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), almost a decade ago. This time around, Mr. Carrey and Mr. Shadyac walk an equally perilous tightrope with a muchness of a niceness that threatens to make them lose their comic balance due to an excess of sentimentality. But somehow, they escape with only one or two minor missteps.

The first occurs when Mr. Carrey's Bruce Nolan, Buffalo's "local color" TV reporter, newly empowered by a zap from Morgan Freeman's avuncular God, happens to catch a moment on television when Jimmy Stewart is literally promising the moon to Donna Reed in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Bruce brings the movie's paper moon down closer to his own beloved, Grace Connelly (Jennifer Aniston). Later, there are reports around the world of tidal waves-caused by the increased proximity of the moon-wreaking death and destruction everywhere. This news is just as well, because this is a movie that must stay small and provincial to avoid becoming stupidly grandiose. After all, the Buffalo of Bruce Almighty is not the grimly existential Buffalo of Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66 (1998), but a replica shot entirely in Los Angeles. Indeed, it's a Buffalo of old Polish jokes, hopelessly cut off from the rest of the world by its own demented self-absorption.

The second misstep involves Bruce's pre- (or post-)feminist sweetheart, Grace-an intentionally ecclesiastic name-who serves as Bruce's salvation from his own monomaniacal ambition to replace the town's TV-news anchorman. All Grace wants from Bruce is a wedding ring and lots of children. But is Grace's retro zeal really a misstep, or a crafty commercial calculation designed to exploit the current backlash against feminism?

No matter: Mr. Carrey gets some of his biggest laughs in years by playing up the darker side of his character's small-mindedness. He is assisted by a letter-perfect supporting cast which, in addition to Mr. Freeman and Ms. Aniston, includes Philip Baker Hall as Bruce's wishy-washy boss, Jack Keller; Steven Carell, a television-trained-and-timed comic sensation in his own right, as Evan Baxter, Bruce's rival; Catherine Bell's Susan Ortega, Bruce and Evan's co-anchor; and an array of supporting-cameo bit players lending the leads a full range of eccentric foils. The moral, I suppose, is "Don't be conceited," which I remember vaguely from grammar school and wonder if anyone still really believes. And the subtext? That Mr. Carrey's gifts are, in fact, God-given-and to that I say, "Amen."

To the Manner Born

Thaddeus O'Sullivan's The Heart of Me , from a screenplay by Lucinda Coxon, based on the novel The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann, unfolds on the screen as the most moving kind of love story- intelligent and passionate, carnal and spiritual, joyous, mournful and hounded on all sides by the exigencies of time, history and memory. Good casting, acting, writing and directing help, too, and The Heart of Me has these in profusion.

The action commences at a funeral in London in 1934. Two sisters, Dinah (Helena Bonham Carter) and Madeleine (Olivia Williams), attend their father's funeral together with their mother, Mrs. Burkett (Eleanor Bron). Madeleine, the older sister, is accompanied by her husband Rickie (Paul Bettany) and their son Anthony. Contrasts are established very quickly between Dinah's bubbly bohemianism and Madeleine's steely self-control. Mrs. Burkett stands between her two daughters as an unflinching upholder of propriety. Rickie is fascinated by Dinah's free spirit, and it is only a matter of time before he will inevitably surrender himself to this fascination.

Back in her elegant home, Madeleine assures Dinah that she can stay as long as she likes, but she later confides to Rickie that she is worried about her sister's future unless Dinah quickly finds a husband. Yet when a seemingly suitable but hardly idyllic match is arranged for Dinah, Rickie impulsively goes into Dinah's bedroom late at night and orders her to break her engagement-which she later happily does, much to her sister's consternation. Rickie initiates an affair with Dinah soon after, and their three lives are thereon tempestuously affected and interconnected forever. Actually, four lives, since the mother of the two sisters will continue to exert a powerful influence in the interests of keeping up appearances, despite all the errant affinities involved.

The story goes forward and back through no fewer than seven flashbacks and flash-forwards over the next 12 years. World War II disappears in the mists of history, with the global conflict's only relevant consequence being the death in action of Madeleine's son Anthony. The decisive years traveled in the course of the story are 1934, 1946, 1937, 1946, 1937, 1946, 1939, 1946. One baby born of love dies in childbirth; another born in hate lives and flourishes.

I have never read the Lehmann novel on which the film is based, and so I don't know if that is where the chronological structure originated, but the effect of the resulting fragmentation is a simulation of the clipped tones of upper-class English life between the two world wars-the first of which claimed the life of Rickie's father, and the second of his son.

The 1930's are perceived here as a period of disillusionment and crumbling moral values. The Heart of Me , however, is more a chamber drama than a teeming social tract, and its graphic sexuality is more characteristic of contemporary filmmaking than of what was shown on the screen 70 years ago. Though at times Madeleine seems stiffly unfeeling, Dinah selfishly self-absorbed, and Rickie weak and easily manipulated, all three characters not only end up with our sympathy, but also manage to embody the film's lyrical metaphor: a kite swaying aloft that links two generations in a spirit of reconciliation and forgiveness. But oh, the pain and heartbreak in between!

Russian Godfather

Paul Lounguine's Tycoon: A New Russian , from a screenplay by Alexandre Borodianski, Mr. Lounguine and Yuli Dubov, based on the novel by Mr. Dubov, purports to be a true story based on the life of the notoriously corrupt billionaire businessman, Boris Berezovsky. In Tycoon , the fictional version of Berezovsky is named Platon Makovski, and his checkered career is traced from its academic beginnings in 1988 to the false reports of his assassination 15 years later. In the last shot of the film, Platon's glaringly defiant face promises a return to Moscow to confront a competing gang of thieves from the K.G.B.

Mr. Lounguine, in an interview with The Moscow Times (Sept. 19, 2002), compares his film to The Godfather and Citizen Kane : "He's nice and not so nice," said the Russian director, who lives in France, speaking of his film's protagonist. "He's cultured, intelligent and passionate, and he destroys everything that's around him."

Still, I found it hard to evaluate the film because, frankly, I couldn't understand Platon's financial maneuvers beyond having something to do with brooms exchanged for cars, and the bribing of border custom agents. All in all, the endless treachery and justifiable paranoia of neocapitalist Russia leads to terminal narrative confusion. Yet I was enthralled by the evocation of a desperate world of storytellers who all seem to know where the bodies are buried. The sheer moral ambivalence and physical exuberance of the spectacle makes it worth seeing, if only for a glimpse at a once-feared society engulfed by chaos.

Old Man of the Sea

Baltasar Kormakur's The Sea , from a screenplay by Mr. Kormakur and Olafur Haukur Smmonarson, based on a play by Mr. Smmonarson, was the official Icelandic Academy entry for Best Foreign-Language Film of 2002. But its roots seem to lie in the dour and chilled Scandinavian family dramas going back at least to the plays of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. In The Sea , Thordur (Gunnar Eyjolfsson), the aging owner of a fishery in a remote Icelandic coastal village, is awaiting the return of his far-flung family. From what little I know about Iceland, I imagine it to be like Hawaii-except, of course, for the climate. Both places are proverbially "in the middle of nowhere," and yet their landscapes are so expansive that you might feel at the center of the world.

Thordur's problem is that he wants to turn his fishing business over to his son Agust (Hilmir Snaer Gudnason). The son, however, prefers to stay in Paris on his father's allowance, writing love songs for his French mistress, Françoise (Hélène de Fougerolles). The rest of the family is even more impossible, and by the time the ghastly family reunion has concluded, with its nude romps in the icy pools and drunken brawls, the fishery has burned down, the father and his favored son have come to blows, and the encroaching power of big business here as everywhere else continues to crowd out the small community businesses.

The film is funny and entertaining nonetheless in an Icelandic sort of way.

Endnote

Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) is being honored with a three-week, 34-film retrospective running from June 13 through July 3 at Film Forum (209 West Houston Street, 212-727-8110). Don't miss Trouble in Paradise (1932), June 13-19. I will keep my readers posted on each week's Lubitsch classic.

Wednesday, Sept. 15

This is a given: There is nobody as in command of the old variety-show idiom as Marty Short. And he's taken the next big step: Just as Rosie O'Donnell commandeered the spirits of Merv, Mike Douglas and Dinah Shore for her return-to-cuddly-showbiz talk show, Martin Short has commandeered the spirits of Merv, Mike Douglas, Dinah Shore plus the entire SCTV alumni society for his. And that includes Katharine Hepburn, Ed Grimsley and Jerry Lewis. But, as anybody who watched the entire Jerry Lewis telethon last week knows, there is a strange conflict going on within the Short persona that is not unlike the one that his first guest, Billy Crystal, had to struggle with: Where he once lived to mock show business, he has now become show business. When he and Jerry sang "There's No Business Like Show Business" on Labor Day, it was clear he had, like the body-ingested pilot he once played in Inner Space, been devoured by "the bidness." The distance was gone. Mr. Short no longer looks like a moppet or a parody-meister; he's a show business entity. And he and Mr. Crystal, trading licks on show No. 1, were–and we say this out of love, out of respect, with a lot of that really good stuff–a little Friars Club. And, as a host, and an interviewer, and we say this out of love, respect and really good stuff, he's a very, very good guest. About as good as Jerry on his two talk shows. On the other hand, Mr. Short's Janeane Garofolo was as good as anything the SCTV crew did and his Emmy-interview segment in show No. 2 made one laugh so much as to hurt the pelvis. Laughing. With spritzing. And loving. And all that really good stuff. So, is there an audience in the late afternoon for remotes with Mr. Short hopping the boundary between intra- and extra-show- business shtick? Our advice is this: It may not last for very long–the last time anybody tried any real comedy during the day was David Letterman's morning show–so get to The Martin Short Show now. [WCBS, 2, 4 P.M.]

The sitcom–a dying form? Discuss.

This fall season, there will be more new dramas than half-hour comedies for the first time in a long time. ( Variety puts it at a decade.) And of the 16 sitcoms making their debuts, only two or three–Fox's Action and Freaks and Geeks and ABC's Oh, Grow Up –are expected to do O.K.

"Every network had a hard time with comedy last year," said Garth Ancier, the new chief programmer for NBC, which used to rule the comedy roost but seems to have lost its edge, clinging on to Frasier and Friends as a life raft.

But why? Television executives blame a number of factors, including themselves.

"I think people started focusing last year all around town on the wrong issue. The issue was, 'We don't believe the traditionally shot, four-camera show is working, so we're going to do a lot of single camera film pilots,' and most of those were projects that didn't pan out," Mr. Ancier said. "I think instead of saying we've got to make funny shows with people who are funny in them, with funny writers and good ideas, everyone said, 'This form isn't working, so we're doing one-camera film.'"

Mr. Ancier said he will spend the upcoming development season focusing on developing good, old-fashioned, funny half-hour shows. But when he pitches around for writers, he may have a hard time finding good ones. With more cable channels developing their own original programming, the Hollywood writing pool is thinning out–another reason given for this year's dearth of truly funny shows.

"There just aren't as many great writers as we need there to be. There's the same number of smart show-runners as there's always been, but now there are more networks," said Bob Greenblatt, a former Fox programmer who now runs the Greenblatt Janollari Studio. That's why, he said, you now see any writer from any halfway successful show getting huge development deals, even those who don't have so much experience. For instance, Adam Chase, the Friends executive producer who started out as chief story editor on the show in 1994, just inked a $12 million deal to work up ideas for Michael Ovitz's Artists Television Group.

Mr. Greenblatt said he expects things to turn around, pointing out that in the early 80's, the same obituaries were being written about the sitcom. Then came Cosby , and the sitcom was back.

Still, the people who handicap these things said, in the meantime, you can expect the networks to try out new types of shows. They're calling it "alternative programming." In that category are Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and Whose Line Is It Anyway? Besides drawing amazing ratings–the 22 million viewers who tuned into Who Wants to Be a Millionaire at the end of its run last month was almost unheard of for a game show, and in the summer, no less–these shows are also cheaper to make. While a sitcom can cost $700,000 to $800,000 per episode (not including the tab for talent), a Whose Line Is It Anyway? can be produced for less than $300,000. "There is a tremendous cost savings and, for a show like Millionaire , it's a pretty big win for the network," said Bill Cella, head of network ad buying at McCann Erikson. "It's cheaper programming. That's kind of the new wave that's starting to come out."

Tonight, on Frasier , Roz's parents have big noses. [WPIX, 11, 7:30 P.M.]

Thursday, Sept. 16

Used to be when you thought of Rob Lowe, you thought of St. Elmo's Fire or some other brat-pack smash. Even with his recent comeback, things seem to have gone way downhill for him. When NBC plugs his role in The West Wing , it lists his only credit as Atomic Train . Maybe things will get better when his new show debuts. Speaking of television movies, it's a two-hour Diagnosis: Murder . Is a masked TV magician killed for ratings? [WCBS, 2, 8 P.M.]

Friday, Sept. 17

Lucille Ball: feminist hero?

That issue came up on a recent night when a few of us were sitting around the dinner table talking about how I Love Lucy is considered one of the best sitcoms ever. All of a sudden, Becky Hubbert–a costume designer who works as a stylist on assorted commercials and theatrical productions–exploded. She said that, while Lucy makes her laugh, she has come to realize that Lucy actually was hurting the feminist cause at the time.

"I'd never thought of Lucy as antifeminist. I'd always thought of her as amazingly strong," she said. But then someone pointed out to her that Lucy was always getting in trouble, always looking stupid, and her opinion changed.

"She always fucks up and cowers," Ms. Hubbard said. "She never, ever gets it right, never. Desi forgives her, of course."

Ms. Hubbard pointed to a classic episode as an example: "She'd try to be sneaky and underhanded, and it wouldn't work out. In this one episode, she was saying, 'Oh, it's easy to get a job, it's easy to be the man of the house.' So she and Ethel go to an employment agency and they have no experience so they lie and get a job and immediately fuck it up. Desi tries to keep house and fucks up, too. The end is, 'We should just keep our positions. Our positions are what they are for a reason. You're the breadwinner, I'm the housewife,' which is really pretty crappy."

Judy Rhee, a production designer for television, commercials and movies (she just finished up Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream ) who was also sitting at the dinner table, strongly disagreed: "She did not cower. She was very strong and she was not made out to look like an idiot," Ms. Rhee said. "It was for comedic purposes that she was getting into all this trouble." In the end, Ms. Rhee's point was that Lucy had a show named after her. [Nickelodeon, 6, 11 P.M.]

Saturday, Sept. 18

Who's cooler than Francis McDormand? Nobody, that's who. Catch her tonight in Fargo , especially since Saturday Night Live and Mad TV are still in repeats. [TNT, 3, 10:25 P.M.]

Sunday, Sept. 19

Something possessed Keri Russell, star of Felicity , to go out and cut all her hair off, which doesn't seem to make much sense because isn't that why people like her? Because of that great hair? Now, think of her as Sampson, weakened. Maybe she'll be able to pull it off, anyway, but it definitely could prove to be a big mistake. It's not on tonight, but it will be in this slot next week. [WB, 11, 9 P.M.]

Monday, Sept. 20

If Ellen DeGeneres were to come out of the closet on national TV today, it probably wouldn't cause much of a stir. It's just not such a crazy thing to see on the tube these days. In all, there are 17 new gay characters on the four major networks this television season, on shows like ABC's Wasteland and Oh, Grow Up and on Fox's Action . When you tally it all up, there's probably about the same number of new gay characters as there new minority characters.

How could that be? Well, there are simply more gay writers than minority writers in Hollywood. "As a writer, as a storyteller, you draw from experience," said Wasteland creator Kevin Williamson, who's openly gay, when asked why he thought it was. "So I am writing from what I know. That's Writing 101. And so these are the stories that are coming out of me at this time in my life. If we're not seeing enough diversity on television, I would encourage us to get some more creators in there, some more diverse storytellers, so that they can create these stories, so they can make their way to the air."

Despite the influx of new gay characters, it still isn't enough for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. They claim that not enough of the new gay characters are lead characters. Today on the Ellen rerun: the one where she and Paige go to a health spa and, in the end, Ellen is stuck, hanging on a fence. [Lifetime, 12, 4 P.M.]

Tuesday, Sept. 21

Finally, Melrose Place meets Spin City , when Heather Locklear debuts as the Mayor's campaign manager on Michael J. Fox's City Hall sitcom. After Melrose Place was canceled, Ms. Locklear was offered parts on King of Queens , Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place and Spin City . She said she chose to go with Spin City because she wanted to work with Mr. Fox. It's not clear how she'll do on a sitcom, but it should do O.K. for the show's ratings. [WABC, 7, 8 P.M.]

Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week

Since for me the Polish-German Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947), once internationally famous for his "Lubitsch Touch," is high among the 10 best and most influential picturemakers of the Western world–one to whose work I gravitate even more as I get older–it follows that if there's a rare Lubitsch film on, it's almost automatically movie of the week. Based on the famous Sigmund Romberg operetta, 1927's The Student Prince [Monday, Sept. 20, Turner Classic Movies, 82, 3 A.M.; also on videocassette] , one of Lubitsch's last silent pictures, is not really representative of him, being neither a romantic comedy nor a historical drama, but rather an extremely touching sad love story.

When I first saw it 30 years ago, I rated The Student Prince in my movie-card file as "Exceptional," adding: "Typically sublime visit to the beautiful world of Lubitsch and his royal kingdoms, about a crown prince who falls in love with a barmaid and cannot marry her. Full-bodied and eloquent performances by Norma Shearer, Ramon Novarro, Jean Hersholt and the rest of the cast. A lovely movie and a minor masterpiece." The other day I saw the film for only the second time and it killed me. I don't believe I've ever seen a picture that as brilliantly (wordlessly, remember) captures the intoxicated, overpowering feeling of two people falling in love as the first few scenes between Shearer's tavern maid and Novarro's title character. The gestures, body language and looks that pass from one to the other are astonishingly fresh and evocative–superbly modulated, choreographed, photographed and edited by the master.

This is the picture that moved the status of Norma Shearer (1900-1983) substantially upward; within three years she would win a best-actress Oscar (for 1930's dismal The Divorcee ) as well as five more Academy nominations in the same decade. Absolutely her most beguiling and emotional work, however, is in The Student Prince . Just as this Lubitsch portrait of turn-of-the-century Old Heidelberg is also the zenith in the career of Mexican-born Ramon Novarro (1899-1968). A 1920's heartthrob in the Valentino vein, his biggest success was in the original Ben-Hur (1926), but he never before or since displayed the sensitive range and subtlety of his work for Lubitsch. As for Danish character-man Jean Hersholt (1886-1956), his name today may only be familiar because the Academy annually (since 1956) presents a Special Oscar called the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, named to commemorate the actor's outstanding humanitarian activities. If any performance sums up this Hersholt image, it's in The Student Prince as the self-effacing, benevolently loving tutor to the crown prince. All three stars don't seem to be acting in this movie; their characters' actual existence becomes palpable.

One sequence Lubitsch didn't shoot was inserted at the insistence of M-G-M chief L.B. Mayer, who felt there needed to be a more obvious romantic sequence, Lubitsch's version being more circuitous and understated. This scene, directed by later weepies veteran John M. Stahl, brings Shearer and Novarro for a tryst onto a pretty obviously fake hill of budding, rustling flowers. Although the sequence seems totally out of character for the movie–and nearly an archetypal example of kitschy silent-movie sentimentality–one's affection for Shearer and Novarro is so strong by that point you don't really mind too much.

While he bewitchingly conveys the heady beauty of blossoming love, Lubitsch also quite devastatingly expresses the crushing anguish of lovers' parting and loss. Seeing The Student Prince brings with it a kind of shock of recognition: Yes, the movies really can tell you so much about human beings without the use of words. How to describe the delight in watching Shearer innocently edge all the way behind Novarro when she's first looking him over, or the way she walks purposefully but with no reason around his room before leaving the first time? Lubitsch reminds us that once upon a time pictures were about feelings, and they had a heart.

Banned in America: The World's Sexiest Commercials . Um … if they're banned in America, then how can Fox air them? Just another example of a Murdochian paradox. [WNYW, 5, 9 P.M.]

Thursday, April 8

Forget that Mars-Venus crap. Here's the true gender divide: Men like to watch hard-core pornographic acts of sex and violence, women like to watch pookie-wookie little-wittle babies crawl around. Go figure. Every episode of Baby's Story follows a happy couple through pregnancy, birth and itty-witty googly-shmoogly baby-waby gaga. In other words, this one's strictly for the ladies. [Learning Channel, 52, 2 P.M.]

Friday, April 9

Speaking of babies, aspiring parents who'd like their child to be born on the first day of the new millennium would do well to conceive tonight, based on the obstetric convention that gestation averages 266 days. To set the mood, NYTV recommends the cooking show that gives free rein to the id– Two Fat Ladies . [TV Food Network, 50, 11 P.M.]

Saturday, April 10

So you weren't one of the hundreds of millions of people who saw it in the theater, or one of the millions more who saw it on video. It was too mainstream, you said. It's too long. James Cameron's an ass. I'm not a 13-year-old Leo fanatic. I know the ending. I don't like boats. I hate the song.

Now Titanic is on cable. Don't you realize by now that it's inescapable? (Don't worry. Despite the dialogue, it's actually entertaining.) [HBO, 32, 8 P.M.]

Sunday, April 11

The cable network Bravo is known for its sedate programming, offering such arty fare as Inside the Actor's Studio and films like Farinelli . But with Michael Moore, the liberal labor activist and obnoxious television personality whose new program, The Awful Truth , debuts tonight, the network gains some topicality and controversy. Following the same path as his film Roger & Me and his previous show TV Nation , The Awful Truth finds Mr. Moore railing at targets such as Ken Starr (by staging a real witch hunt on Capitol Hill, complete with shrieking hysterics in 17th-century dress) and tobacco executives (by leading a group of carolers, who have lost their larynxes from smoking, to their houses).

"With Bravo, we can go a little further," said Mr. Moore from his Michigan home. Mr. Moore hosted each of the 12 episodes in front of a live audience in Chicago. "We don't have to go through a broadcast network standards and practices department. What you see is exactly what we intended." In 1994, NBC aired TV Nation , and then it moved to Fox in 1995. At those networks, Mr. Moore said, he had to cut pieces on abortion, gay rights, condoms and the savings and loan crisis. "The cuts were not because of sex, violence or language, but because of ideas," he said.

Mr. Moore has already run into trouble with his new show, but not from the network. While shooting a segment about Ira Rennert, the tycoon building a 63-acre property in Southampton, L.I., Mr. Moore received a restraining order from Mr. Rennert, who claimed Mr. Moore and his crew trespassed and harassed him. Mr. Moore had to stay 150 feet away from Rockefeller Center, which houses Mr. Rennert's office. "We shot a funny piece on what I couldn't do because of the restraining order," said Mr. Moore. Since Mr. Moore couldn't appear on Late Night With Conan O'Brien , which is taped in Rockefeller Center, Mr. O'Brien shouted questions at him from his ninth-floor window.

One of Mr. Moore's favorite tactics is to enter corporate offices and demand immediate action for some cause or another. For instance, he shows up at an H.M.O. with a man who cannot get the company to pay for his life-saving surgery, presenting an addled public relations executive with an invitation to the man's upcoming funeral. Even though the publicist doesn't make any decisions regarding the man's fate, he or she becomes the focus of Mr. Moore's ire.

"They're the good Germans," Mr. Moore said. "'We are only doing our job': I don't buy that as an excuse for participating in something that hurts other people. The P.R. execs are not minimum-wage employees. Many of them are former journalists who realized they can make three times as much money in P.R. They go from a profession where they try to tell the truth, to a profession where they don't tell the truth, they spin the truth. You notice we never hassle security guards or secretaries."

Mr. Moore also ignores critics who say he's gotten too big for his role, that his celebrity makes him incapable of acting the underdog. "I don't present myself as a victim–in a democracy, we have the most power. Instead, I would say to myself, 'This is really amazing. You made Roger & Me nine years ago, you have not sold out or crossed over, you're still fighting the good fight, standing up and giving voice for people whose voices we don't hear in television or movies.' I've been consistent in my beliefs. Yes, I make more money now than when I did Roger & Me . But before Roger & Me , I was making $15,000 a year." [Bravo, 64, 9 P.M.]

Family Guy , the lukewarm animated show that premiered after the Super Bowl, finally settles into its cozy post- Simpsons time slot tonight, and Fox will see if its gamble paid off. In giving the slot to Family Guy , the network shuffled Futurama , another new animated show, into a less attractive Tuesday time slot. But when Fox let Futurama debut in the Sunday slot for the last two weeks, it drew monster ratings, attracting several million more viewers aged 18 to 49 than its Simpsons lead-in. If Family Guy tanks, expect Fox executives to hang their heads in shame. [WNYW, 5, 8:30 P.M.]

Monday, April 12

Fatboy Slim may as well give up producing albums and videos and just concentrate on commercials for films. In the last few weeks, the films She's All That , Office Space , Cruel Intentions and 10 Things I Hate About You have all used the musician's catchy dance hits in their ad campaigns, no doubt giving him some sizable copyright fees for "The Rockafella Skank," "Praise You" and "Going Out of My Head." Now comes Go , the flashy new film from Swingers director Doug Liman, whose ads contain a snippet of Fatboy's "Gangster Tripping." Tonight, Go star Scott Wolf stops by The Tonight Show With Jay Leno . [WNBC, 4, 11:30 P.M.]

Tuesday, April 13

After the massive publicity MTV scored last year with its Wanna Be a VJ Too contest, it was inevitable that they would do it all over again. So today, 2,000 screaming wannabes will clog Times Square for their shot at fleeting fame.

Last year's big winner, selected by viewers, was the massively irritating Jesse Camp, a gaunt, spiky-haired, flamboyant slacker, an incoherent lad who made Pauly Shore look like George Plimpton. Fortunately for both the network and its viewers, Mr. Camp is moving on from MTV and is ready to pass the torch to another young thing. Attempting a music career, Mr. Camp has recorded a glam-rock album with his band, the Eighth Street Kids, whose video MTV will air this week.

Amid all the Jesse Camp publicity and backlash–he's not really a punk, he boarded atthe exclusive Loomis Chafee School!–Dave Holmes managed to squeak by. Mr. Holmes, a jovial, stocky, likable guy, was the runner-up in last year's contest, and was bid farewell, thanks for trying, have a good life. But he made connections, and tenaciously networked the MTV execs until they found a job for him, veejaying on MTV's sister channel M2. Since then he's become a full-fledged video jock on MTV, hosting his own shows and attracting a following. Though MTV viewers chose Mr. Camp over him, it's Mr. Holmes who's sticking around.

"This is the best job," said Mr. Holmes recently, kicking back in a sweatshirt and khakis at the MTV Studios–which look as you would expect, with bluish lights and funky, annoying designs on the walls and floors. "This place is the ultimate treehouse."

Mr. Holmes, 28, had moved to New York in 1994 after graduating from Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass. He spent three years crunching numbers as a "media planner" in advertising firms such as Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising, but quit to become an actor, temping during the day and working with sketch comedy and improv troupes at cabaret joints at night. Thanks to his affable on-camera presence and his music-geek knowledge, he beat out 3,998 other contenders to earn his runner-up status.

Now he can't go into record stores without being recognized by 12-year-old girls. "If I want to grab a disk, I throw on a hat and sprint," he said. For the record, the kind of disks he's buying lately are neo-country alternative like Son Volt and Wilco.

And what does Mr. Holmes think of Mr. Camp? "He's a great kid, a fun guy. But we don't hang out on the weekends. He's not on my speed dial." [MTV, 20, 8:30 P.M.]

Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week

In 1939, M-G-M released an effervescent, lightly satirical romantic comedy called Ninotchka [Sunday, April 11, Turner Classic Movies, 82, 6 P.M.; also on videocassette] , which ranks well among the enduring delights of American cinema, yet virtually all its makers were heavily accented Europeans: a Swedish superstar, Greta Garbo; a Polish-German director-producer, Ernst Lubitsch; two Viennese scenarists, Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch; a Hungarian story-writer, Melchior Lengyel; a German composer, Werner Heymann; Prussian, Hungarian and German supporting actors, Felix Bressart, Bela Lugosi and Sig Ruman. While the picture is about Russian aristocrats and communists (seduced by the Western world) in Paris, it was shot entirely in Culver City, Calif., and the closest anyone got to Russia was co-star Melvyn Douglas' father, a Russian-born concert pianist. Among the other above-the-line talent, only Irish-descended supporting actress Ina Claire and witty, sophisticated co-screenwriter Charles Brackett were born in the United States.

Can anyone argue that a great part of the golden age of American film–from the 1920's through the 50's–was not enormously influenced by the vigorous and various talents from abroad? Remember, our most beloved star of the silent era was the Englishman Charlie Chaplin, and among our most influential directors was another Englishman, trained in Germany, Alfred Hitchcock. Could we use more of this foreign impact right now? French master Jean Renoir–himself a Beverly Hills resident from 1940 until his death in 1979–used to say that the mischievously urbane Ernst Lubitsch "invented the modern Hollywood," by which he meant that American films were significantly colored by Lubitsch's cosmopolitan humor after his arrival here in 1923. Ninotchka is a perfect, and extremely popular, example–with lots of lighthearted joshing of the Soviets, who were about to become one of our strongest allies. How much more sophisticated the world was then.

The original ads for the movie were notoriously succinct: "Garbo laughs." This signaled the waiting populace that it was the divine diva's first comedy–and what a lovely comedienne she turned out to be–kidding brilliantly her own sullen reclusiveness. Who else could get such a terrific laugh from a two-word response to Douglas' admission that he has an overwhelming compulsion to flirt with her? She says languidly, "Suppress it." Of course, Lubitsch and his writers designed the whole picture for Garbo, and the big moment–when, after Douglas has tried in vain to make her laugh, he accidentally falls off his chair and she completely breaks up–is deservedly famous and breathtaking in its simple audacity. Talk about effectively playing off a star's persona! But this sort of picture-making essentially disappeared with the fall of the studio star system. Today we encourage versatile actors, not star personalities, and so another major glory exclusive to the movies is taken away.

Ninotchka was only the second really great film of Garbo's long career (the other was George Cukor's 1936 version of Camille ) and also, sadly, it would turn out to be her penultimate picture. (Her last was a better-forgotten, ill-conceived comedy, Two-Faced Woman , ironically also directed by Cukor.) But what a true and wonderfully human exit Ninotchka remains. Lubitsch used to say, "I have been to Paris, France, and I have been to Paris, Paramount–I prefer Paris, Paramount." Well, this is Paris, M-G-M–a fantasy world of charm and merriment, and of that fabled "Lubitsch touch," which implied charm, provocative circuitousness and gaiety, combined with a slightly bittersweet awareness that all happiness is transient–but isn't it swell while it lasts! With pictures like Ninotchka , we can savor this unique and very special Lubitsch feeling forever.

Our cup runneth over: In one week, three of my all-time favorite films, all made by the same director, the inimitable though much imitated, popular and innovative genius of a filmmaker, especially to be remembered for the irresistible sparkle of his comedies and musicals; that Berliner of Polish and German Jewish extraction who, as no less than Jean Renoir once said to me in the 60's, "invented the modern Hollywood," Ernst Lubitsch. By "modern," Renoir meant Hollywood films from about 1925 through the late 40's–when Lubitsch died–and even into the 50's, 60's and, in unfortunately fewer and fewer apparent ways, to the present. In his day, Lubitsch was probably the most respected director among his peers, and his name was a household word, everybody having heard of that universal phrase of praise, "the Lubitsch touch," which was a way of describing his often oblique way with dialogue and storytelling, a certain Continental style that was as unmistakable as it was difficult to describe. Today, except for true film aficionados, scholars and aged remaining fans, he is barely talked about. Yet Billy Wilder, perhaps the last survivor from the Golden Age, always used to have a sign on the wall of his screenwriting rooms: "How would Lubitsch have done it?"

The Mayor ought to declare Sunday, April 26, Lubitsch Day because these three of the master's most wonderful and representative films can and should be seen by anyone who craves real quality or needs to be convinced that there has been a general and pervasive dumbing down of our popular entertainment. Begin with Lubitsch's sometimes poignant romantic comedy-drama, one of his richest looks at the oddly contradictory and unpredictably diverse traits of human nature, that 1940 masterwork, The Shop Around the Corner [Sunday, April 26, Turner Classic Movies, 82, 2:15 P.M.] . Set in a pre-World War II Budapest department store, and starring three anything-but-Hungarian types, James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan and the Wizard of Oz himself, Frank Morgan–each of whom is at their absolute best–the picture never for a second stretches credulity, and you soon realize Lubitsch's unspoken point that regular people are the same the world over, no matter how individually quirky they may be. The main plot–that Stewart and Sullavan, who definitely do not get along with each other in the workplace are, unbeknown to both of them, pseudonymous pen pals of amazing rapport–is so good that it has been used in at least one acknowledged remake ( In the Good Old Summertime ), one Broadway musical ( She Loves Me ) and is currently being shot with Tom

Hanks and Meg Ryan ( You've Got Mail ). But with Lubitsch it is only the central motif in a

tapestry of observations on the lives of all the employees at the shop, as well as the owner, whose plight is actually the most touching. Supporting players, like the sublimely funny Felix

Bressart or the brilliantly obnoxious Joseph Schildkraut, get equal weight in this lovely movie, which my family always used to watch around Christmas, maybe because it is one of Lubitsch's greatest gifts to us.

In the first year of full sound (1929), it was Lubitsch who made the first all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing musical comedy, The Love Parade , starring Maurice Chevalier (his first American film) and Jeanette MacDonald (in her sexy, pre-Nelson Eddy period). Over the next four years, Lubitsch made four more romantic musicals, the last of which was the best of all (though the least popular at the time), his thoroughly divine 1934 version of Franz Lehar's famous operetta The Merry Widow [Sunday, April 26, Turner Classic Movies, 82, 4:15 P.M.] . It's Chevalier and MacDonald for the final intoxicating time, both of them again from another typically Lubitsch Ruritanian country, she the richest woman in the land, he a soldier of the king charged to use his charms to lure her back home after she runs off to Paris. Witty, often hilarious, sometimes bittersweet, but ever effervescent, the picture is also perhaps Lubitsch's most effectively pointed look at cocksmanship, coming down deeply on the side of monogamous love: "Here they are," Jeanette tells Maurice at the (thinly disguised) bordello where he is surrounded by adoring courtesans, "all your little tonights, and not a tomorrow among them." There is an amazing seduction scene that features one of the most glorious camera moves in picture history: as first Jeanette alone, then Maurice with her, dance "The Merry Widow Waltz," the camera somehow waltzing with them. I try to see this movie at least once a year and it has never let me down.

Lubitsch's penultimate film was, appropriately, a look at the inevitability of death and a contemplation on the rewards and punishments of the afterlife, all part of an amusing and profoundly human chronicle of one not-very-important man's life, the 1943 Technicolor production Heaven Can Wait [Sunday, April 26, AMC, 54, 11 P.M.] . Part of the famous Lubitsch style was achieved by the director's practice of acting out all the roles for all the actors, from the bit players to the stars. Lubitsch was a not very tall, heavy-set man with a very strong German accent, but he had begun in silent pictures as a star comedian, and his sense of timing was impeccable. Jack Benny had been in Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942) and I once asked him how Lubitsch's acting-out had been. "Well," Jack said, "it was a little broad, but you got the idea!" And so in Heaven Can Wait , Don Ameche gives the performance of his career, and Gene Tierney is at her spunkiest, yet most beautifully vulnerable. Marjorie Main, Eugene Pallette, Louis Calhern, Signe Hasso are all terrific in Lubitsch's most forgiving farewell to "the good life." Sunday's (or any day's) perfect conclusion.

Wednesday, April 22

Go to Harry Shearer's Web site–www.harryshearer.com–if you want to see something funny. It's Tom Brokaw doing an emergency lead-in on the death of Frank Sinatra, who ain't dead yet. "Good evening," says Mr. Brokaw in the feed, all serious. "Late word from California tonight. Legendary entertainer Frank Sinatra has died after a long and private battle with cancer. We have a look back on his extraordinary life. The voice that touches millions."…

Mr. Shearer–a writer, comedian, Spinal Tap member, NPR guy and Simpsons voice–discovered the taped bit on a 24-hour satellite feed in February. That was when the rumor of Mr. Sinatra's demise spread all across the country–well, all through the media, at least; Mr. Brokaw recorded his lead-in so that NBC could have the crummy honor of being first on the air with the scoop. See Mr. Brokaw do his magic every night on NBC at 6:30 P.M. [WNBC, 4, 6:30 P.M.]

Thursday, April 23

Tonight on Tom Snyder's Late Late Show , Angela's Ashes author Frank McCourt reminisces about his New York days as an English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, from a table at McSorley's Ale House on East Seventh Street. Look closely for his actor-writer brother Malachy McCourt in the background. Observer Wise Guy Terry Golway, back to the camera, plays one of Malachy's drinking buddies: "The highlight was when the director came over to us and said, as if to a bunch of novices, 'You can just talk amongst yourselves,' said Mr. Golway. "Malachy starts nodding his head, saying to us, 'Have you ever noticed that the people in these background shots are the most agreeable people in the world? They're always agreeing and nodding their head Yes!' So the director calls 5-4-3-2-1, and all of a sudden he's shaking his head, yelling, ' No ! No! Feck no!'–part of the gritty realism, I guess. I assume they can fix the sound later …" [WCBS, 2, 12:35 A.M.]

Friday, April 24

Let's say you're Charlie Rose . You're the host of an upscale late-night PBS talk show. Sometimes people accuse you of fawning, but you know it's not true. Let's say you have on Larry David, the humbly nihilistic co-creator of Seinfeld (as Charlie did last Thursday). During the conversation, Mr. David says: "I felt good, just the fact that the four episodes were produced, because I had never produced four episodes before and, frankly, I didn't know that I was capable of doing that. So just the fact that we had four shows on the air made me very excited. I didn't think about the future. I thought, 'Phew, I got by. I did the four. O.K. Let's go back to New York. Let's get on with our lives." Do you reply:

a. "You don't have much self-confidence, do you?"

b. "The first four episodes weren't very good, were they?"

c. "But then they started throwing money at you, and the rest is history."

d. "This is the reason I like you so much."

See end of column for the answer .

Tonight with Charlie, it's David Ross, former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. [WNET, 13, 11 P.M.]

Saturday, April 25

Tim Meadows thinks his time might be up on Saturday Night Live . "I would do it as long as they would let me," he said, "but I've been on for seven seasons, and you have to leave after a certain point. I think I'm just about there." …

Mr. Meadows has been incredibly loose this year. He's been a bright spot in an SNL season that started off nicely, then went straight to hell with the firing of Norm MacDonald from "Weekend Update." Everyone in the cast looks tentative, and a lot of the writing sounds like stuff out of a college follies. And then there's Mr. Meadows–sane and always amusing, no matter what they hand him.…

"This season has been my favorite for myself," he said. "Mainly, I have a lot more fun at 11:30 on Saturday. Before, I felt tight and now I just don't care anymore. I care about messing up, but I go out there with the attitude that I can do anything I want and I don't care. I've gotten to a place where I think it's time for me to move on." To a sitcom? "Well, that's being talked about right now." As a writer or talent? "As talent, although I would love to be a writer. Nobody has ever offered, but I think that I could write a really good sitcom." What about? "A father and son who solve crimes. We would be two guys sitting on a bench riffing." …

What about Norm MacDonald? "My favorite memory of Norm and myself is going over to his office and talking to him and [writer] Jim Downey and being able to talk about anything and nothing was sacred and you could make fun of anything." Tonight is a repeat, with Nathan Lane and Metallica. [WNBC, 4, 11:30 P.M.]

Sunday, April 26

NYTV correspondent Carl Swanson reports: Last Sunday, NBC's Brave New World included a weird dig at the competition: A committee of the Alphas (think of them as youthful Harvard grads hired to think "out of the box") who work at the Conditioning Center (think of it as the marketing department at a major network) are asked to figure out why the lower classes–the Deltas–are restive. In this futuristic time, wars have been ended and people spend their time being entertained, though not by network television. An Alpha named Ingram suggests that maybe they need new slogans. He holds up a black-lettered sign on a bright yellow background. It says, Dumb Is Good , a rehash of ABC's "TV Is Good" slogan. "They say we only use 10 percent of our brains," says Ingram, in another allusion to the ABC campaign. "That's way too much." The leader of the Conditioning Center, who actually turns out to be the bad guy, dismisses Ingram's idea: "Irony, Ingram? Do you think that the Deltas will get it?" Apparently not, since ABC has more or less canceled its "TV Is Good" campaign after failing to rebound in the ratings.…

Tonight, NBC goes for it again with another event, Merlin , starring Martin Short, Isabella Rossellini, Helena Bonham Carter. Wonder if Sir Lancelot will have anything to say about CBS. [WNBC, 4, 9 P.M.]

Monday, April 27

Jerry Nachman, former New York Post editor and news director at WNBC and WCBS, moved to Los Angeles and now writes for Politically Incorrect . Mr. Nachman was always a tough blowhard who never suffered fools gladly–but it sounds as if the TV business has him cowed: "I've never felt dumber," he said. "The big difference here is how smart the comedy writers are, the average 24- or 30-year-old here is much smarter than their counterparts in newsrooms. They're dauntingly bright and they're getting younger. And I think one of the reasons they're smarter is that the admission price is higher…. It's not that the people at [channels] 2 and 4 and the Post were dumb, but there were bell curves. It just doesn't work like that here, and I've never seen that before, in all the places I've worked all my life. I'm the one who's barely hanging on…. I feel the pressure here, I get up early and I get the Post and the News on line, and I read The New York Times before I go to bed on line. I've got to make sure because people are just reading all the time. The writers also seem to know everything about music and TV and movies; they're way outta my league. I usually know the cops and robbers stuff, the court stuff, but that's it." Tonight, Bill Maher plays host to Al Franken, Star Jones and Elizabeth Wurtzel. [WABC, 7, 12:05 A.M.]

Tuesday, April 28

The Bronx-born former anchor for WCBS and for WNBC's Live at Five , Tony Guida , has gone to CNNFN. He covers the stock market for about two and a half hours each weekday. "The principal difference is it's intelligent," he said. "What makes it real interesting is that, number one, the subject is becoming more and more of a subject because everyone is in the market these days. There's a bus that stops in front of my house, and sometimes when I'm going to the newsstand, I see that the drivers are reading the financial pages. Business news has become general news." And Mr. Guida said he doesn't depend on his old TV colleagues for his news fixes: "The local news I tend to keep up with on the radio." [CNNFN, 32, 9 A.M.]

* Answer to Charlie Rose quiz: D.