Movie of the Week: “The Marriage Circle”

A splendid controversy arose in 1981 over the director Ernst Lubitsch and his second Hollywood feature, “The Marriage Circle,” which was filmed in 1923 and released the following year. Lubitsch, who was born in Berlin in 1892, started directing movies in his early twenties and displayed an exquisitely ribald and inventive comic sensibility in such productions as “The Oyster Princess,” but he was most famous for his spectacular dramatic pageants (such as “The Loves of Pharaoh”). The controversy was sparked by Dwight Macdonald’s assertion, in an article in the New York Review of Books, that Lubitsch made “The Marriage Circle” as a “facsimile” of Charlie Chaplin’s 1923 romantic drama “A Woman of Paris.”