"Ernst Lubitsch, the German film director who left Berlin for Hollywood in 1923, is best remembered for the famous "Lubitsch touch" in such masterpieces as Trouble in Paradise and Ninotchka, featuring Greta Garbo. Kristin Thompson's study focuses on Lubitsch's silent films from the years between 1918 and 1927, tracing the impact this director had on consolidating classical Hollywood filmmaking. She gives a new assessment of the stylistic two-way traffic between the American and the German film industries, after World War I each other's strongest rival in Europe."--BOOK JACKET.