A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
The pleasure of a story often comes not from being told something but from catching it yourself. When you leave the two in plain sight and let the audience supply the plus and the four, you turn them from spectator into collaborator, and people are endlessly fond of puzzles they solve on their own. Lubitsch understood this in visual terms: show a wedding ring quietly removed and pocketed before a husband walks in, and every viewer becomes a detective, feeling clever rather than lectured. The caution is that this trust only works if the clues are genuinely there. Withhold too much, and cleverness curdles into confusion — the audience stops feeling trusted and starts feeling lost, which breeds frustration instead of affection.
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