The Doll

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Matthew B Ernst Lubitsch's under-rated 1919 fantasy The Doll is about a man who seeks to avoid marrying a real woman by forming a union with a doll instead. Or perhaps all the characters are dolls, and do not realise it. The opening describes the film as "Four amusing acts from a toy box…" The illusion is established from the very beginning. In a neat, self-referential touch, we see Lubitsch himself apparently constructing the studio set in miniature, and adding dolls to it which then come to life. Throughout the film, the sets look like they belong in a doll's house. Most of the utensils in a kitchen are drawings painted on the wall. Paper clouds part to reveal a sun with a silly facial expression. The moon similarly resembles something from a Georges Meliés film. Animals are phoney too. A cockerel is little more than an animated drawing, and a cat is a moving silhouette shape in the style of a Lotte Reiniger cartoon. The horses that draw a carriage are merely men in horse costume. This level of artifice establishes the film as a fantasy, and prevents us from spending too long worrying about the probability of the plot. The tale is essentially a comical variation on fairy tales such as Coppelia. It is tempting to see The Doll as a light-hearted variation on The Stepford Wives. Like a number of men, Lancelot imagines he can find a wife who is easy to control, and bend to his wishes, only to find that she does not come with an instruction manual, and is less pliable than he hopes. What he gets is a wife who sticks her tongue out or slaps his face when it suits her. He must learn to love a human being with all the unruly and unpredictable behaviour that comes with that. She is not a doll, but a complicated mechanism. Ernst Lubitsch thought that The Doll was the best of his German movies, and it must be a strong contender. It is a very funny movie, and not without some neat touches of style. At one point the screen splits into 12 circles showing the mouths of greedy relatives. A stop motion effect is added to portray Hilarius' hair turning white in a matter of seconds. These imaginative visuals are matched by a surprisingly large number of good one-liners for a silent movie. The Doll is enormous fun, and must be one of the drollest feature-length comedies of the 1910s. I wrote a longer appreciation of The Doll on my blog page if you would like to read more: https://themoviescreenscene.wordpress.com/2021/04/22/the-doll-1919/ Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 08/24/23 Full Review Read all reviews

The Doll

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