Madame DuBarry

Paris, the end of the eighteenth century. Jeanne, an apprentice in a hat shop, comes by her beauty first to the nobility and then to the court, and becomes the mistress of King Louis XV. She changes her name, takes a title, and turns into one of the most powerful women at court. In those same years the anger of the people is building in France. Ernst Lubitsch's silent film was made in Germany just after the First World War and drew great interest abroad; it was the production that carried the names of Lubitsch and Pola Negri to America. Emil Jannings plays the king. The telling gives history not as a lesson but as a story inside the court. Its crowd scenes are very large for their period.