Die Puppe
Ossi Oswalda (Artist)
The young Lancelot is a confirmed bachelor and suitably shocked when his uncle, Baron de Chanterelle, decides it’s time for him to get married. Lancelot runs away and ends up in a monastery where he can be sure he won’t meet any women. But the monks turn out to be greedy characters and persuade Lancelot to enter into a sham marriage in return for a generous dowry. And who could fit the bride bill better than a wind-up doll? What Lancelot doesn’t know is that his doll is replaced by the doll maker’s high-spirited daughter Ossi because of a mishap shortly before the ceremony. Ossi takes great pleasure in the masquerade and doesn’t behave like a doll at all…
Illusionist Ernst Lubitsch and the magnificent Ossi Oswalda celebrate the comic value of supposedly inanimate bodies in a cheerfully anarchic manner and with Méliès’-style charm, making joyous fun of the bourgeois ideal of the domesticated wife who is not supposed to fall out of line. (MS)
Ossi Oswalda (Artist)
Actor Ossi Oswalda, who was born Oswalda Stäglich in Niederschönhausen in 1987, won the hearts of audiences as an outspoken, tomboyish, and totally insubordinate comedian from the 1910s onwards. Between 1916 and 1919 she worked primarily for Ernst Lubitsch, appearing in such films as Shoe Palace Pinkus (1916), I Don’t Want to be a Man (1918) and The Oyster Princess (1919). In the 1920s, her image matured from pretty little thing to modern Berlin woman. Apart from acting, she set up her own film company in 1921, producing movies such as Cupid at the Wheel (1921), Der blinde Passagier (1922) and Colibri (1923). The transition to sound film sounded the death knell for her film career. When the Nazis seized power, Ossi and her Jewish partner emigrated to Prague, where she died impoverished and forgotten in 1947.
