Wyler Applies a Lubitsch Dunk
The Criterion Channel has been a fantastic option for film viewing. Through its wonderfully curated collections, we’ve been able to discover women directors we never would have seen otherwise and do the kind of deep dive into film classics that is always rewarding.
Currently they have a collection of William Wyler films available. We started These Three, and I was surprised to recognize early on that it was a version of Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour. Only something was very wrong. Thanks to the Hollywood Censors in 1936, the gossip that undoes the two women running a school is not a false claim that they are lesbians but a claim that they are a menage a trois. Furthermore, there is a happy ending tacked onto the film.
Most people will know the film version of The Children’s Hour, also directed by William Wyler, filmed in 1961 and starring Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn. It has a very dark ending and in its time was seen as a critique of McCarthyism. No matter the rumor about teachers Karen and Martha, the results are the same — once destroyed, you cannot restore your reputation.
Unless, that is, your doctor love interest moves to Vienna and Martha, set free of her obligations by Karen, follows him. In that case you have — your happy ending. In fact, what you have is the ending of Little Shop Around the Corner.
When I was living in Menlo Park, California, in the early 1990s, there was a “palace” movie theater, restored by David Woolsey Packard, that showed films from the 1930s-1960s. I went at least once a week, sometimes more, and usually saw a double feature. Each month there was a featured artist. I went to at least eight of the Ernst Lubitsch films, and before long I saw a pattern. In every film there was a discussion of whether it was proper to dunk a pastry in one’s tea. Or if not a discussion, then clandestine or embarrassed dunking. Even Greta Garbo in Ninotchka dares to dunk.
The final weekend of the Lubitsch festival featured, of course, Little Shop Around the Corner. In the key scene, when Jimmy Stewart’s character Kralik is finally going to meet his blind date at the coffee shop, the sidekick Pirovich who accompanies him, upon looking in at Margaret Sullivan’s Klara, exclaims: “Oh no!” Kralik wants to know what the matter is, thinking she has some physical deformity, and Pirovich says, sadly, “She dunks.”
“So what if she dunks! Why shouldn’t she dunk? Let her dunk!” Kralik announces. I was the only one laughing out loud in the theater, recognizing this recurrent bit.
Lubitsch was introducing the topic of dunking as early as his 1916 film Pinkus’s Shoe Palace. Jeanette Malkin identifies it as a practice associated with Eastern European Jews in her article, “The Cinematic Shoe: Ernst Lubitsch’s East European Touch in Pinkus’s Shoe Palace.” It is also a British custom to dunk one’s biscuit in one’s tea.
The ending of These Three does not match the rest of the film. When Joe goes off to take a position as a doctor in Vienna, his beloved Martha doesn’t follow him. However, the troubled Karen convinces her to follow her true love. So the film has this strange scene at the end of a Viennese cafe, Martha looking in at the window for Joe, who is shielded by the wait staff, who moves to reveal him somewhat furtively dunking his pastry in his tea. As their eyes meet, they smile broadly and meet at the door for an embrace and kiss. AND everyone in the cafe and in fact on the Viennese street stand up and applaud.
In a way, it feels like Wyler said, “Well, if they want a happy ending, we’ll give it to them.” And he turns his otherwise serious-minded and somewhat sedate film into, well, a Lubitsch romantic comedy. Comedies end in marriage, right? Comedies come with dunking!
Little Shop Around the Corner was made in 1940, and We Three in 1936, but by 1936 there was already plenty of dunking going on in film. And often, as with Ninotchka, it feels dropped in from nowhere, a little inside joke, a little surprise levity. I’d like to think this was Wyler, who was often criticized as not having a “signature” and making films in multiple genres that were not unified by his approach to filmmaking (which seems right to me: Wuthering Heights, The Westerner, and Dead End require different treatment).
If you’re interested in film, I urge you to subscribe to Criterion Collection. So many streaming options compete for our attention, but it is this one that will reward the most and provide for some very interesting insight into film history.
