Criterion Collection: Lubitsch Musicals [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

"Shall I see you again?" asks Lieutenant Niki von Preyn (Maurice Chevalier).
"Oh, I hope so," says Franzi (Claudette Colbert), the luscious and liberated young violinist and leader of an all-girl orchestra in Vienna. Niki met her an hour or so ago at an outdoor biergarten.
"When"
"Well, perhaps tomorrow night. We could have dinner together," she says
"Ohhh...don't make me wait 24 hours. I'm so hungry!"
"Well then...perhaps we could have tea...tomorrow afternoon."
"Why not breakfast...tomorrow morning?" Niki suggests with a pleading smile.
"No, no. First tea...then dinner...then...maybe...breakfast."
The scene fades out with a kiss...and the next scene opens with a shot the next morning of two frying eggs.

This opening to The Smiling Lieutenant is one good example of how sly, charming, efficient and light-hearted Ernst Lubitsch could be. I'm not sure what all the hullabaloo concerning "The Lubitsch Touch" is all about, but I do know that The Smiling Lieutenant, The Love Parade, Monte Carlo and One Hour with You are among the most sophisticated paeans to the pleasures of mutual pleasure we're likely to see. They were made before the Code slammed down on Hollywood. Here, with Lubitsch, sex is as much a part of love as a kiss or a wink. You might have one without the other, but it wouldn't be half as much fun.

And what is there about Lubitsch endings? They're as clever as his beginnings. In Monte Carlo, for instance, we're in the Monte Carlo opera house watching two people as they watch the end of the operetta, Monsieur Beaucaire. In one box is the handsome and debonair Count Rudolph Falliere (Jack Buchanan). In another box is the beautiful and sad Countess Helene Mara (Jeanette MacDonald). Monsieur Beaucaire is all about a nobleman who pretends to be a hairdresser so he can be close to and woo a noblewoman. Lubitsch's Monte Carlo is all about...well, a nobleman who pretends to be a hairdresser so he can woo a noblewoman. The situation as it plays out for us observers is amusing, clever and sophisticated. When the curtains come down on Monsieur Beaucaire, so do the curtains on Monte Carlo. We wind up thinking, because we know what's going on, that perhaps we're as amusing, clever and sophisticated as Falliere and Helene Mara. It's a wonderful way to end the movie.

Or The Love Parade, where the ending reverses the beginning of the meeting between the Queen (MacDonald) and the Count (Chevalier). When we realize how Lubitsch is resolving the plot, using almost the same exact dialogue, the moment becomes so charming we can't keep from smiling.

Maurice Chevalier stars in three of the films. Chevalier in his prime shows us why he became such an international star. The man is sexy, charming and worldly in an oddly straightforward way. He has a self-deprecating sense of humor and loves the ladies. Chevalier doesn't just love them and leave them, he loves them and leaves them smiling, as satisfied as he is.

Jeannette MacDonald stars in three and is a revelation for those most familiar with her trilling a stately song in duet with the wooden Nelson Eddy. She's sexy, luscious and does justice to all the skimpy lingerie she wears. She's quite good as a light comedienne and manages to keep Chevalier from overshadowing her.

Among the other stars and supporting players, the standout for me is Miriam Hopkins. She just about steals The Smiling Lieutenant. She's innocent and sly, spoiled and naive and somehow is able to be all at the same time. Her line delivery is a work of art. Hopkins had an unsatisfactory career in Hollywood, and it's our loss. Enjoy her skill and style in Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living, both directed by Lubitsch. They were at the top of their game, both of them, and that's saying a lot.

The four films -- The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, The Smiling Lieutenant and One Hour with You -- are such good company they're not to be missed. You'd have to have a severely ingrown toenail not to watch them with a smile.

Each of the films has a fine black-and-white DVD audio and picture transfer

The one star who is constant to all of these movies is Mr Lubitsch himself. Such was his reputation by the late 1920s that no one in the opening titles gets bigger billing or greater prominence than the director. He took to sound like a duck to water so that even in the earliest of these musical romps, The Love Parade of 1929, his mastery of the new medium seems complete.

These four musicals have strong overtones of the worlds of operetta and Ruritanian romances. Even when the players are not singing they are often talking in rhyming couplets. Lubitsch's style is playful, impish, sophisticated and saucy in a way that must have seemed pretty naughty at the dawn of sound (and was virtually impossible to sustain by the mid-30s when the Hays code had started to bite.)

Your enjoyment of these musicals is likely to be conditioned by how winsome you find Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. Mr Chevalier saunters through them like a naughty puppy dog, frequently winking at the audience and oozing Gallic charm. Frankly, I like his act and find him infinitely preferable to Miss MacDonald's later partner Nelson Eddy who had all the allure of a suet pudding. Miss MacDonald is also a revelation in her early screen roles, revealing an impish sense of humour and comedic skills less evident in her later outings with Eddy. You'd certainly never guess that off-screen her colleagues referred to her as the "Iron Butterfly". Her operatic voice with its tendency to over-enunciation is perhaps something of an acquired taste, arguably it was too good for the material it was required to sing and one is not surprised that in later years she performed in grand opera.

My favourites in this collection are the first and the last which arguably have the most hummable scores. The Love Parade gives you a rare chance to catch diminutive English comedian Lupino Lane and buxom American chanteuse Lilian Roth in supporting roles, an unlikely comic duo but very funny together especially in their duet Let's Be Common. And the opening scene of this movie in which a husband catches philanderer Chevalier with his wife is a hoot, an absolute classic. The last, from 1932, is One Hour With You which also teams Chevalier and MacDonald. There is one scene in it in which Charles Ruggles, dressed as Romeo, asks his manservant why he had mistakenly informed him that he had been invited to a costume party. The manservant's answer produced in me the longest and loudest guffaw I've had in years. The two in-betweeners are Monte Carlo which teams Jack Buchanan with Miss MacDonald, and The Smiling Lieutenant which teams Chevalier with Claudette Colbert. Mr Buchanan, a singer and hoofer, was a huge star of the London and New York stages but his slightly horsey good looks and bleating tenor voice are likely to leave modern audiences baffled about his appeal. The Smiling Lieutenant is a delight but has the least memorable score of the four movies.

The technical quality of this package is pretty good in terms of picture and sound quality although a few scenes have those curious vertical "scratch" lines down them.

Incidentally if you are just now discovering these movies and enjoy them, don't overlook Love Me Tonight made in 1932 and starring Chevalier and Macdonald. It was made not by Lubitsch but by Rouben Mamoulian who had clearly studied Lubitsch and Rene Clair and then pretty much outclassed them both.

Of the four films on this Criterion Collection disk, I intend to discuss THE SMILING LIEUTENANT (1931). It is another risqué film from famed German-born Hollywood film director Ernst Lubitsch, he of the acclaimed light touch that just made it under the wire before Hollywood's repressive Hays Code was enforced. It is an 89-minute, black and white musical/romantic comedy, based on the operetta EIN WALTZERTRAUM ("A WALTZ DREAM"), by Leopold Jacobson and Felix Dormann. The screenplay was written by Ernest Vajda and Samson Raphaelson. Although the movie was Oscar-nominated, and was the biggest grossing film of 1931, it was not permitted to be re-released once the Hays Code began to be enforced. It was, in fact, considered lost until a print was discovered in Denmark in the 1990s.The picture has an all-star cast, including several actors with which Lubitsch frequently worked, that excelled in delivering these gossamer Lubitsch valentines. And the movie is set in that gemütlich, glamorous Mitteleuropa city, Vienna, which I have finally managed to visit recently that here, looks lovely and decorative as a wedding cake.

Winsome Lieutenant Niki of the Austrian royal guard has a new girlfriend, the pretty and charming musician Franzi. He's crazy about her and is smiling at her while on duty. Just then, King Adolf and his daughter Princess Anna from the neighboring kingdom of Flausenthurm arrive for a state visit, and Anna catches a wink directed to Franzi. She falls for Niki, marries him (he has virtually no choice in the matter), and whisks him off to Flausenthurm. Franzi follows them and enjoys a brief rekindling of the affair with her handsome lieutenant before the Princess finds out. Franzi, who is much more experienced than Anna in the ways of the world, gives the princess tips on how to make herself more attractive to her husband.

Lt. Nikolaus `Niki" von Preyn is played by the invariably charming French crooner Maurice Chevalier (Gigi ). Franzi is played by the equally charming French actress Claudette Colbert (It Happened One Night). Princess Anna is played by Lubitsch favorite Miriam Hopkins, in the first of three movies she would make with the director, the others being TROUBLE IN PARADISE and Criterion Collection: Design for Living. Niki's batman Max is played by perennial comic favorite Charles Ruggles (TROUBLE IN PARADISE, Bringing Up Baby [DVD].) The rhythmic underscoring of the film comments on the characters' moods; it was orchestrated by Conrad Salinger, who had been a pupil of the English composer Frederick Delius.

The film's got its share of witty lines. Princess Anna tells Franzi, "I don't know very much about life. I got all my knowledge out of the Royal Encyclopedia. A special edition arranged for Flausenthurm, with all the interesting things left out." And at one point, after King Adolf and Princess Anna proudly serve Niki the Viennese favorite dish veal schnitzel, and boast that they got the cow, as well as the recipe, from Vienna, Niki laments, "Poor cow. To have been born in Vienna, and die in Flausenthurm."

Lubitsch is also known for the comedies Ninotchka, THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER,The James Stewart Hollywood Legend Collection, and To Be or Not to Be. His films are suffused with subtle, subliminal sexuality: no nudity, done with innuendo, and the great deal of magnetic energy the topnotch director was able to draw from his actors. His acclaimed "Lubitsch touch" is a light one. It is best seen here, I think, in the arrival of piles of boxes to Princess Anna's palace, all bearing the names, one feels sure, of the most chic shops in Vienna. And all containing clothing, the viewer will feel sure, recommended by Franzi, that is guaranteed to make the formerly dowdy Anna look good to her new husband. And then there is the new sheet music, to the jazz tunes of the day. It's no wonder Princess Anna will soon become irresistible to her formerly inattentive husband. Viewers are likely to find this film irresistible too.