SCREWBALL POLITICS: American Populism and European Politics, 1935–41
McCormick, Rick. 2020. In Sex, Politics, and Comedy: The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch, 244–81. Indiana University Press.
McCormick provides an analysis of the three most popular films of comedic director Ernst Lubitsch, and how each was infused with political agenda in the decade leading up to World War II. In an era where most comedies, particularly of the kind Lubitsch was making, were populist and neutral if they touched on politics at all, McCormick argues that Lubitsch’s films were most successful when they were political.