The Lubitsch Touch?

Hardly.

Hoffman was no one’s idea of a matinee idol. He was, instead, a character actor, that yeoman laborer of filmdom who, without a pre-packaged image to protect, can be relied on to sacrifice vanity and shun mass adoration in the service of total immersion into a role. In Hoffman’s case, that meant paunchy, rheumy-eyed regular guys and vulnerable losers whose desperate search for connection so often mirrored his audience’s own shabby, shameful, unphotogenic lives.
....
To paraphrase an exchange between Billy Wilder and William Wyler at Ernst Lubitsch’s funeral: We’ve not only lost Philip Seymour Hoffman, we’ve lost all those Hoffman moments that might have been.

We really should not equate the two; there's simply no comparison between the ultimate losers Hoffman portrayed to Ernst Lubitsch's beautiful elegant creations. It was a different Hollywood back then, turning out uplifting, not soul deadening flicks. We had a greater respect for life when things were not so easy, it seems...

"The Lubitsch Touch" is a brief description that embraces a long list of virtues: sophistication, style, subtlety, wit, charm, elegance, suavity, polished nonchalance and audacious sexual nuance." -- Richard Christiansen

" . . . The Lubitsch Touch, with its frequent Freudian overtone of revealing previously hidden motivations, the sexual story, by an adroit bit of business or a focus on a significant object. The Lubitsch Touch signals to the audience that the old interpreter is at it again, letting us in on a priviliged perspective, embracing the audience as a co-conspirator of interpretation, an accomplice in the director's and the camera's knowingness." -- Leo Braudy

"It was the elegant use of the Superjoke. You had a joke, and you felt satisfied, and then there was one more big joke on top of it. The joke you didn't expect. That was the Lubitsch Touch...." -- Billy Wilder

We simply should not be mentioning these two artists in the same breath.

In many of his performances, Hoffman’s characters bordered on either the manic or depressive, but he brought a depth and intellectual honesty to each of them beyond the lines of the script. In his starring roles, his characters often took a darker course, in many cases being the antihero.

“Hoffman isn’t someone we want to be,” Claire Dederer wrote of Hoffman’s roles in Salon. “He’s someone we want to be better than. Here is an actor whose entire oeuvre can be described in one sentence: ‘At least I’m not that guy.’

Whereas in Lubitsch's films, you wanted to be that guy...
(or gal. see Garbo in Ninotchka.)

 

Ernst Lubitsch, who directed it, finally has brought the screen around to a humorist's view of those sober-sided folk who have read Marx but never the funny page, who refuse to employ the word "love" to describe an elementary chemico-biological process, who reduce a Spring morning to an item in a weather chart and who never, never drink champagne without reminding its buyer that goat's milk is richer in vitamins. In poking a derisive finger into these sobersides, Mr. Lubitsch hasn't been entirely honest. But, then, what humorist is? He has created, instead, an amusing panel of caricatures, has read them a jocular script, has expressed—through it all—the philosophy that people are much the same wherever you find them and decent enough at heart. What more could any one ask?