Not only the man who refined Hollywood comedy with such
masterpieces as Trouble in Paradise, The Shop Around the Corner,
and To Be or Not to Be, Ernst Lubitsch also helped invent the
modern movie musical. With the advent of sound and audiences
clamoring for talkies, Lubitsch combined his love of European
operettas and his mastery of film to produce this entirely new
genre. These elegant, bawdy films, created before strict
of the morality code, feature some of the greatest
stars of early Hollywood (Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald,
Claudette Colbert, Miriam Hopkins), as well as that elusive style
of comedy that would thereafter be known as the Lubitsch touch.
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Ernst Lubitsch enjoyed one of the brightest directorial careers
of the 1920s and '30s, so much so that "the Lubitsch touch"
became a household phrase--an ineffable meringue of visual wit
and flawless timing, ribald humor and emotional delicacy, and a
genius for ing all manner of naughty notions in his viewers'
minds without doing or showing anything censorable. So much
charm, style, and inventiveness, yet video distributors have
largely neglected his films, especially the ones that helped
establish Para Pictures as the most cosmopolitan studio in
Hollywood. How much more gratifying, then, that the folks at
Criterion who first made Trouble in Paradise (1932) available on
DVD have bundled Lubitsch's four early-sound musicals in their
admirable Eclipse series. This wonderful quartet of still-saucy
and beguiling comedies provides bounteous entertainment while
also defining a period in film history--and constituting a
monument to a director who knew there should be more to "the
talkies" than mere talking.
And more to screen musicals than mere "all-singing,
all-dancing," which is what lured ticket-buyers at the dawn of
movie sound. Instead of the clomping chorus lines and stagebound
song-selling of The Broadway Melody and its ilk, Lubitsch created
the film operetta, in which song numbers grew out of the
characters' behavior and took place in "natural" spaces, and the
rhythms and patterns of "normal" dialogue were themselves often
musical in stylization. But that's only part of it. Lubitsch also
composed a kind of visual music, building motifs through the
rhythmic recurrence of staircases, doorways, windows--frames
within frames. And then he syncopated it all through the editing,
cutting for visual rhymes as well as comic surprise.
His first sound film, The Love Parade (1929), was a sensation
with critics, audiences, and Hollywood itself, earning Academy
Award nominations for picture, director, and actor Maurice
Chevalier. Chevalier plays a nobleman recalled to his mythical
Mittel-European land of Sylvania after his extracurricular
activities in Paris while serving as a diplomatic envoy lead to
scandal. The rake is soon joined in a marriage of convenience
with Sylvania's queen, played by newcomer Jeanette MacDonald.
Banish all thoughts of those treacly MGM musicals with Nelson
Eddy that came half a decade later; this Jeanette MacDonald has
spirit and sex appeal to burn, and Queen Louise's imperious
manner toward a husband ill-made for the role of prince consort
sets off a droll battle of the sexes. At a running time of 112
minutes there are some longueurs, but the stars are in splendid
form, and they get yeoman backup from the sparkling Lillian Roth
and astonishingly limber music-hall comic Lupino Lane as a couple
of servants. Lubitsch, already established in silent films as the
master of innuendo with closed boudoir doors, continues his
censor-defying tricks with sound: among other things, allowing
the punchline of a ribald joke to be heard, but not Chevalier's
lead-up to it, seen in elaborate pantomime through a distant
window. (Note: Victor Schertzinger's song "Dream Lover,"
introduced in this movie, would do evocative duty--mostly
uncredited--on the soundtracks of numerous Para films of the
'30s and '40s.)
Monte Carlo, unlike Sylvania, is a real place, but that's beside
the point; all the films in this set unreel in a Europe of the
Berlin-born Lubitsch's own imagining, adroitly realized by the
Para art department under Hans Dreier. Monte Carlo also
happens to be the title of Lubitsch's second musical (1930),
which teams the director again with Jeanette MacDonald but not
Chevalier (busy on other Para projects). She's a
scatterbrained countess who's stepped out of her wedding gown to
avoid marrying a silly-ass duke (Claude Allister) and hopped the
first train handy--especially handy, given that she's in her
lingerie. The Chevalier part is taken by Scottish-born musical
comedy star Jack Buchanan, playing a count who decides to romance
her in the guise of a hairdresser. As scripted by Ernest Vajda,
this is very much not a romance of equals--the man always has the
upper hand and the last laugh--yet the strapping MacDonald looks
as if she could th the reedy Buchanan within an inch of his
life. The film's greatest cl to fame is its bravura,
still-exhilarating "Beyond the Blue Horizon" sequence, in which
MacDonald sings that song out the window of her train compartment
and everything in the known world, from the chug-chugging engine
to the fringe quivering on the windowshade to entire sunny fields
populated with farmworkers, joins in ecstatic support of the
melody. A landmark sequence; and yet the movie's most magical
instance of the Lubitsch touch is a quiet moment with the
countess striding in profile through a Monte Carlo park one
evening, a man stepping up to flirt with her, a cutaway to his
friend as an offscreen slap is heard, and back to a of the
countess still in profile, still striding, unperturbed, her
rhythm unbroken. Sublime.
The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) is an especially welcome element
of the set, given that it was for many years thought to have been
lost. It also marks a salutary advance over the previous films,
as Lubitsch's first collaboration with writer Samson Raphaelson;
Raphaelson became the director's most invaluable creative
partner, the two working in such harmony that Raphaelson proposed
some of the most "Lubitschean" visual ideas in their films and
Lubitsch came up with some of the funniest lines. Raphaelson may
also have been instrumental in nudging the director toward a more
egalitarian sexual politics--something to be applauded not out of
political correctness but because comedy between equally matched
parties tends to be much richer and funnier than comedy at the
expense of one person (or gender), as in Monte Carlo. The Smiling
Lieutenant builds toward the unlikely but very satisfying
collusion of the two women in playboy-officer Maurice Chevalier's
life, played by Claudette Colbert at her most exquisite (in
normally verboten left profile!) and Miriam Hopkins, who would go
on to shine for Lubitsch in Trouble in Paradise and Design for
Living (1933). (As an early promissory note on those great
performances, savor her self-introduction as the daughter of the
King of Flausenthurm: "I may be a princess, but I'm also a
girl!")
Nineteen-thirty-two was a busy year for Lubitsch. Besides the
antiwar film The Man I Killed, an episode in the omnibus film If
I Had a Million, and his masterpiece Trouble in Paradise, he made
the fourth film in the Eclipse set, One Hour With You. On this,
his final Para musical, he cut himself some slack. First,
it's a remake of his first truly Lubitschean film in Hollywood,
the 1924 silent comedy of infidelity The Marriage Circle; for
another thing, the initial plan was that George Cukor should
direct following Lubitsch's detailed instructions. That didn't
fly, and soon Lubitsch took over, completed the picture, and
denied Cukor any credit (credit Cukor still felt he deserved
decades later). However fraught the production may have been, One
Hour With You emerged as a delightful musical comedy, with
Chevalier and MacDonald together again as André and Colette, a
high-society Parisian couple with a perfect marriage--till
Colette's girlhood pal Mitzi (Genevieve Tobin) sets out to seduce
André. The film boasts the catchiest song score of the
bunch--especially when Chevalier is confiding his temptations
directly to the audience, which happens frequently. Like The Love
Parade and The Smiling Lieutenant, One Hour With You was
nominated for the Academy Award as best picture of its year.
Each film in Lubitsch Musicals has been impeccably transferred
to DVD. The prints are crisp and luminous (apart from some s
of MacDonald on the train in Monte Carlo), and in the case of the
three earliest titles, something quite rare: the DVDs preserve
the early-sound frame ratio of 1.20:1. Yes, it's momentarily
startling to encounter this tall format--most of all in the
hilariously iconic representation of "Paris" that opens The Love
Parade--but distraction soon gives way to deep satisfaction at
seeing the original design and composition of Lubitsch's s.
As usual with Eclipse offerings, there are no extras on the DVDs,
but the liner notes are models of lucidity, critically and
historically. --Richard T. Jameson