A silent film by Ernst Lubitsch, The Doll (1919) is cinematic artifice at its most curious. Lubitsch pretends it is crafted from what he pulls out of a toy chest, and a story gets underway presenting a babyish, hypersensitive young man (Hermann Thimig, fascinating) who refuses to get married. What he does instead, to gain an uncle’s dowry (for some gluttonous monks!), is to “marry” what he believes to be a mechanical doll. But not so. The dollmaker’s daughter is pretending to be the doll. Ossi by name, she is played by Ossi Oswalda, a German actress who attained a lot of fame in the Silent era and, in ill health, died at only 48. Here, she seamlessly displays the daughter’s mischievousness and is a luminous delight. In fact, so is The Doll. Anyone who is getting into Lubitsch must see it.