Ernst Lubitsch Made the Hollywood Comedy Sublime

In the summer of 1943, the playwright and screenwriter Samson Raphaelson received word that Ernst Lubitsch, the Berlin-born director of such incandescent Hollywood comedies as “Trouble in Paradise,” “The Shop Around the Corner,” and “Heaven Can Wait,” had suffered a fatal heart attack. Raphaelson, who had written scripts for those films and for many others, set about composing a tribute to Lubitsch, extolling him in terms that few other directors of the era elicited: “However great the cinema historians will eventually estimate him, he was bigger as a person. He was genuinely modest. He never sought fame or coveted prizes. . . . He was as free from guile and pretense as children are supposed to be, and this made him endlessly various and charming.”