Broken Lullaby (Blu-ray) by Stuart Galbraith IV Director Ernst Lubitsch is, of course, best remembered for his many great comedies, but he also occasionally dabbled in straight drama. His comedies often had deadly serious underpinnings, as in To Be or Not To Be (1942), and Broken Lullaby, a very serious drama, has moments of grim, ironic humor. The picture is something of a revelation: it's a superb yet largely forgotten film about the human cost of war, grief, guilt, bitterness and, ultimately, forgiveness. It's the kind of film best experienced with a suspension of modern standards of drama. The style of acting is very early-talkie, i.e., heavily influenced by the style of stage acting that existed at the dawn of sound, and the picture is sentimental in the good sense, full of the kind of uninhibited emotion modern movies are, to their loss, so emphatically averse. Viewed as 1932 audiences did, Broken Lullaby is prof...Read the entire review »