The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg. 1927. USA. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Screenplay by Hanns Kräly, based on the play Alt-Heidelberg by Wilhelm Meyer-Förster. With Ramon Novarro, Norma Shearer, Jean Hersholt, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Philippe De Lacy. Preserved and restored by The Museum of Modern Art. World premiere of MoMA restoration. 105 min.
Ernst Lubitsch’s adaptation of a 1901 German stage play was MGM’s second-most expensive silent production, after Ben-Hur. A young prince (Ramon Novarro) is sent to Heidelberg for his education, falls in love with an innkeeper’s niece (Norma Shearer), and is called back to his kingdom to assume the duties his birth demands. The story is pure romantic formula; what Lubitsch does with it is graceful, wise, and heartbreaking.
The love scenes have an intimacy that comes from the accumulation of small, specific gestures rather than dramatic declaration—the quality later critics would call “the Lubitsch Touch” already fully formed here. Jean Hersholt gives the film’s most unguarded performance as the prince’s tutor, whose own attachment to Heidelberg runs deeper than he can articulate. Lubitsch had reservations about both his leads (he reportedly told Shearer she played the waitress “in too grand a manner”), but the friction between his instinct for understatement and the actors’ broader style produces its own
tension. The film lost $307,000 on first release. Its reputation has only grown since.
This new digitization from a nitrate print acquired from MGM in the 1930s represents the first time the full domestic release version has been restored.