In L.A., we like our ladies well preserved — jowls, cheekbones, and posteriors properly nipped and tucked.

So hang on, Egyptian Theatre, you’re a great survivor.

And a genuine happy birthday, as well, to the 30-year old American Cinematheque, resident film society at the Egyptian.

We’ll be there tonight for the fabulous screening of Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Loves of the Pharaoh” (1921), a silent epic film from the maestro of language-driven, witty, parlor-room dramas.

Live music and fun! We like to sit in the balcony!

Here’s Susan King’s nice piece in the L.A. Times.

Ta ta darling, and, really, not to worry, you don’t look a day over 88!

Starring the great Jack Benny and the precious Carole Lombard, who died horribly in an airplane crash two months after the film’s completion, “To Be …” is the funniest movie I’ve ever seen in my life, full stop.

Anyone who passed Friday evening at the funky-friendly Bing Theater will explode in laughter at the sight of the guy at right. Sig Ruman, who cut his comic teeth working with the Marx Brothers, plays a hard-striving Nazi functionary who grows increasingly flummoxed as a group of wily Polish actors outfox him and his Fuhrer (“Heil, me!”)

Linking these two movies are indelible threads, delicious connections for the audience. Both films:

• were made by master directors within a few years of each other, 1941-42.
• careen wildly, but credibly, between slapstick, biting satire and social commentary.
• feature art within art: “Sullivan” acerbically reflects on the film industry, as “To Be…” lovingly portrays the theater world.
• use brilliant writing to take on humongous, almost unapproachable, issues — in “Sullivan,” the festering cycles of the American underclass, and in “To Be …” the threat of Nazi totalitarianism, and its absurdities.

In the coup de grace, in “Sullivan,” Veronica Lake plays a striving Hollywood actress who yearns to be introduced to Lubitsch.

Ian — what a masterful duo. Thank you, thank you.

Like this? Read more …

• LACMA film series majestic in July. Go!

Last weekend, we levitated in pleasure under the spell of “Design for Living“ (1933), the sophisticated German-born film director’s version of the Noel Coward play.

Two Americans sharing a flat in Paris, playwright Tom Chambers (Frederic March) and painter George Curtis (Gary Cooper, gorgeous), fall for free-spirited Gilda Farrell (Miriam Hopkins, running the show). She can’t make up her mind which she prefers, and proposes a “gentleman’s agreement”: She will move in with them, but they will never have sex. 

Hopkins, shown in the photo at right kibbitzing with Lubitsch, forms the fulcrum of a love triangle that would be the envy of any woman. She swaps between Cooper and March, jangling the two men like charms from her bracelet.

Hopkins dresses in spectacular evening gowns designed by Paramount costume designer supremo, Travis Banton (one nifty number pictured above). Banton, of course, famously created Carole Lombard and did wonders for Marlene Dietrich.

Here’s a good Banton tidbit from his Paramount protegee, Edith Head, quoted in Paddy Calistro’s biography, “Edith Head’s Hollywood“:

“Travis was very slick and personable. He knew how to talk to the stars — how to make them feel absolutely beautiful in his clothes. I learned everything from him…I learned more from Travis Banton by watching him dress Carole Lombard than anything I’ve ever done. I spent every possible moment staying glued to Travis, trailing him everywhere like a puppy. After all, he was the best designer, bar none, in the world. And he taught me everything I knew about designing.”

The American Comedies of Ernst Lubitsch | LACMA | through July

• Banton dressed Kay Francis and Miriam Hopkins in “Trouble in Paradise,” and Dietrich in “Desire.”
• Banton turned tootsies into stars.

Both films run a dreamy 90 minutes long! Let’ s see how much great entertainment the German expat could pack into 1.5 hours.

Nicola Lubitsch, the director’s daughter, will be in the house for a curtain talk.

Trouble in Paradise (1932), dir. Ernst Lubitsch w/ Miriam Hopkins, Herbert Marshall, Kay Francis. Gleaming black and white cinematography and incredible Art Deco sets by Hans Dreier, Paramount’s top production designer, add sparkle to this witty tale of two jewel thieves—Marshall and Hopkins—who pose as sophisticated aristocrats in order to rob languorous Parisian widow Francis of her perfume fortune. Lightning-quick repartee between these con artists (meeting for dinner in Venice, they express their growing attraction by pick-pocketing increasingly personal items from each other) gives way to complicated emotions when Francis falls for Marshall, thus forcing an incensed Hopkins to concoct her own brand of larceny.

Desire (1936), prod: Ernst Lubitsch, dir: Frank Borzage; w/ Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper. As Paramount’s newly appointed head of production, Lubitsch oversaw The Devil is a Woman, Sternberg’s last film with Dietrich, and personally produced Desire, the star’s first post-Sternberg film, in which she plays a cosmopolitan jewel thief whose attempts to retrieve the necklace that she dropped into the pocket of American businessman Cooper while crossing the Spanish border leads to comedy and romance.

The American Comedies of Ernst Lubitsch | LACMA | month of July

“Desire” photo:  doctormacro.com