Lubitsch’s Hidden Jewish Touch: Jewish Anxieties and Gallic Desires

This chapter reconsiders Lubitsch’s early sound musicals—particularly The Love Parade (1929), Monte Carlo (1930), and The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)—as covert expressions of Jewish cultural identity and diasporic anxiety. Through an analysis of Maurice Chevalier’s performances and the films’ Ruritanian settings, the chapter explores how Lubitsch encoded Jewish concerns regarding assimilation, desire, and social mobility within narratives of romance and musical excess. It argues that these films reframe class and sexual transgression through a displaced discourse of Jewishness, veiled beneath Gallic charm and European cosmopolitanism. By locating the “hidden Jewish Touch” beneath the surface of these operettas, the chapter offers a revisionist reading of Lubitsch’s pre-Code work, revealing how his émigré identity shaped a politics of subtext, ambivalence, and play.