A Royal Scandal (1945) is an Ernst Lubitsch production directed through - rather than by - Otto Preminger. It stars Tallulah Bankhead as Empress Catherine of Russia, aka Catherine the Great. It is not, however, a work of history.It is a sex comedy - one in which sex is never mentioned, much less shown. Lubitsch's trick, known to his contemporaries as "the Lubitsch touch," was to evoke the idea of sex in coy, subtle, and suggestive ways. For example - somewhere in the frame above, the filmmakers have hidden a phallic symbol. Can you find it?
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One can't help wondering whether this bit of censor-defying decor might have inspired similar phallic fun in the Russian sequence of Ken Russell's Lisztomania (1975).
3 comments:
That's hilarious. I wonder if this would make a good double feature with von Sternberg & Dietrich's "The Scarlet Empress," another pseudo-historical Catherine the Great sex comedy, though of a much blacker tone.
Nice piece on Ken Russell over at Senses of Cinema. They've inducted him into their Great Directors section.
Great post an great blog. Congratulations from a Spanish cinema fan.
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