Donald Sosin on Piano

(Die Austernprinzessin). A witty satire on moneyed Americans abroad as well as on the Prussian aristocracy, The Oyster Princess was called by Lubitsch biographer Herman G. Weinberg “a summing up of everything Lubitsch had learned about the art of comedy.” An American oyster maven promises to buy his daughter (Ossi Oswalda, the “German Mary Pickford”) a prince of her very own; the victim recommended by their marriage broker is one down-and-out Prince Nucki, whose bald friend Josef is mistaken for the prince and, eventually, the groom in one of the most lavish weddings ever filmed. The sequence of preparations for the wedding, the whole house consumed with “fox-trot fever,” is an example of Lubitsch's skill in constructing a musical sequence without benefit of soundtrack.