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Ernst Lubitsch is a director best known for his years in Hollywood where he worked from 1923 until his death in 1947. In that time he made such classics as Trouble in Paradise (1932), Ninotchka (1939), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), the original To Be or Not to Be (1942) and the original Heaven Can Wait (1943) before his untimely death. Over the years he developed what became known as the Lubitsch Touch, an indefinable style that permeated through his films. That style gave a very European sensibility to his Hollywood films and accepted an intelligence from his audience. On the surface there is little of this in his early films that he made in Berlin until he emigrated to the USA. But it is there in the cheeky and mildly saucy humour that ran through all his films. Meanwhile, many critics have stated that you can’t understand Lubitsch without looking at and including the first part of his career.

Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin is a three-disc Blu-ray collection of some of his earliest surviving silent films. The set takes its name from a feature length documentary which is also included.

Included are the elegant contemporary comedies I Wouldn't Like to Be a Man (1918) and The Oyster Princess (1919), both starring the kittenish Ossi Oswalda, as well as the Arabian Nights extravaganza Sumurun (1919) in which he himself appears with Pola Negri, and the historical epic Anne Boleyn (1920), the most expensive German film of its day, starring Emil Jannings as Henry VIII. They're accompanied by Robert Fischer's excellent two-hour documentary, Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin.

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