His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch".

His reputation as a grand master of world cinema reached a new peak after the release of his spectacles Madame Du Barry (retitled Passion, 1919) and Anna Boleyn (Deception, 1920).

With glowing reviews and American money flowing his way, Lubitsch formed his own production company and set to work on the high-budget spectacular The Loves of Pharaoh (1921).

Lubitsch sailed to the United States for the first time in December 1921 for what was intended as a lengthy publicity and professional factfinding tour, scheduled to culminate in the February premiere of Pharaoh.

However, with World War I still fresh, and with a slew of German "New Wave" releases encroaching on American movie workers' livelihoods, Lubitsch was not gladly received.

A free agent after just one American film, Lubitsch was signed to a remarkable three-year, six-picture contract by Warner Brothers that guaranteed the director his choice of both cast and crew, and full editing control over the final cut.

Settling in America, Lubitsch established his reputation for sophisticated comedy[2] with such stylish films as The Marriage Circle (1924), Lady Windermere's Fan (1925), and So This Is Paris (1926).

But his films were only marginally profitable for Warner Brothers, and Lubitsch's contract was eventually dissolved by mutual consent, with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount buying out the remainder.

With his first sound film, The Love Parade (1929), starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, Lubitsch hit his stride as a maker of worldly musical comedies (and earned himself another Oscar nomination).

He had quickly developed the recognizable style of romantic comedy which came to be named after him, the pointed and patented "Lubitsch Touch," and was widely recognized by audiences and adored by critics...One major reason for the ease of Lubitsch's transition from Germany to America, and from silents to sound, was the carefully programmed way he approached the production of his films, [creating] a blueprint for a film that was followed on the set with the precision of a great master craftsman.

Vivian sent her baby daughter, accompanied by her nursemaid, Consuela Strohmeier, to Montreal aboard the Donaldson Atlantic Line's SS Athenia, which was sunk by a German submarine on September 3, 1939 with a loss of 118 passengers.

The film reunited Lubitsch with his Merry Widow screenwriter Raphaelson, and starred James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as a pair of bickering co-workers in Budapest, each unaware that the other is their secret romantic correspondent.

Beautifully written (by Lubitsch's favorite writer, Samson Raphaelson), Shop Around the Corner is a treasury of hopes and anxieties based in the desperate faces of Stewart and Sullavan.

The shot of Sullavan's gloved hand, and then her ruined face, searching an empty mail box for a letter is one of the most fragile moments in film.

For an instant, the ravishing Sullavan looks old and ill, touched by loss.Lubitsch next directed That Uncertain Feeling (1941), a remake of his 1925 film Kiss Me Again; an independent production by Lubitsch with Sol Lesser, it was not a commercial success.

[7] The film is about Henry Van Cleve (played by Don Ameche), who presents himself at the gates of Hell to recount his life and the women he has known from his mother onward, concentrating on his happy but sometimes difficult 25 years of marriage to Martha (Gene Tierney).

Presenter Mervyn LeRoy, calling Lubitsch "a master of innuendo", described some of his attributes as a filmmaker: "He had an adult mind and a hatred of saying things the obvious way."

[9][10][11] Biographer Scott Eyman attempted to characterize the famed "Lubitsch touch": With few exceptions Lubitsch's movies take place neither in Europe nor America but in Lubitschland, a place of metaphor, benign grace, rueful wisdom... What came to preoccupy this anomalous artist was the comedy of manners and the society in which it transpired, a world of delicate sangfroid, where a breach of sexual or social propriety and the appropriate response are ritualized, but in unexpected ways, where the basest things are discussed in elegant whispers; of the rapier, never the broadsword... To the unsophisticated eye, Lubitsch's work can appear dated, simply because his characters belong to a world of formal sexual protocol.