I DON'T WANT TO BE A MAN is less visually extravagant than The Oyster Princess (the film on which it is paired on Kino's DVD in the US), but a little more realistic and solid. Ossi Oswalda, the so-called German Mary Pickford, is a bored and petulant teen; a very strict tutor has been sent to watch her, she dresses like a man to escape and go on the town, and winds up spending the evening at a jazz club with her tutor.
SPOILER AHOY: There's a germ of a Victor/Victoria-type comedy here, but it's somewhat flubbed by the fact that it's so hard to read the sexual politics-- Ossi dressed as a man and the tutor wind up cuddling and kissing, yet the movie doesn't seem to be saying that he's homosexual (since they wind up together-- female Ossi and the tutor) at the fade out. So was that normal behavior of two guys hanging out in 1918 Germany? (Try to imagine, say, Mabuse and one of his underlings cuddling.) Did he see her as a person for the first time because he didn't see her as a girl and his pupil? No particular evidence of that dramatic situation on screen.
I Don't Want To Be a Man shows Lubitsch coming closer to the real world, but as would have been the case if Keystone had tried to adapt Edith Wharton, say, he doesn't yet know what to do with it. And, most crucially, he doesn't yet have the actress capable of being more, dramatically and sexually, than a hyperactive tomboy. With his next film, the preposterous and Count Floyd-worthy Eyes of the Mummy ("What do you mean there's no mummy in it?"), he would meet that actress-- Pola Negri.
SPOILER AHOY: There's a germ of a Victor/Victoria-type comedy here, but it's somewhat flubbed by the fact that it's so hard to read the sexual politics-- Ossi dressed as a man and the tutor wind up cuddling and kissing, yet the movie doesn't seem to be saying that he's homosexual (since they wind up together-- female Ossi and the tutor) at the fade out. So was that normal behavior of two guys hanging out in 1918 Germany? (Try to imagine, say, Mabuse and one of his underlings cuddling.) Did he see her as a person for the first time because he didn't see her as a girl and his pupil? No particular evidence of that dramatic situation on screen.
I Don't Want To Be a Man shows Lubitsch coming closer to the real world, but as would have been the case if Keystone had tried to adapt Edith Wharton, say, he doesn't yet know what to do with it. And, most crucially, he doesn't yet have the actress capable of being more, dramatically and sexually, than a hyperactive tomboy. With his next film, the preposterous and Count Floyd-worthy Eyes of the Mummy ("What do you mean there's no mummy in it?"), he would meet that actress-- Pola Negri.