Judith Rosenberg on Piano

Released in the United States under the title Passion, Madame Dubarry established the international reputations of both Lubitsch and actress Pola Negri. Lubitsch steadfastly maintained the viewpoint that the course of history is more often decided in the boudoir than in the stateroom. He said later that he had wanted “to de-operatize my pictures and to humanize my historical characters. I treated the intimate nuances as just as important as the mass movements.” Under Lubitsch's direction, Emil Jannings as Louis XV and Negri as the country girl who was to become his mistress create complex characters out of these historical figures, their gestures modulated to a cinema of close-up observation that creates a counterpoint between the sweeping saga of revolution and the intimate world of the king's bedroom. Lubitsch's version of French history was banned in that country until 1924.