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Pennsylvania's Blue Horizon:
Criterion's Lubitsch Set
The Stop Smiling DVD Review
(Criterion)
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Eclipse Series 8: Lubitsch Musicals
The Love Parade (1929)
Monte Carlo (1930)
The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)
One Hour With You (1932)
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
(Criterion)
Review by Nathan Kosub
Flights of fancy went so far in 1929 that the right dress, the right tuxedo and a big enough soundstage made for the great escape. The economics of the era played a part for the audience, of course, but what of the discovered star? If there is a deeper joy to be found (in fact, there are many) in the four films in the Lubitsch Musicals set from Eclipse than the perfection of Maurice Chevalier’s eye roll, it is the actress Jeanette MacDonald, whose Philadelphia finesse of the thanklessly independent woman suggests how selfish — in the face of so much lightness of song, smiles and romance — Ernst Lubitsch’s earliest directorial efforts in the United States really were.
As The Love Parade begins, MacDonald asks from the sea of her sheets and pillows, “Why am I always awakened from my dreams?” In the kingdom of Sylvania, ministers of war and housemaids draped in pearls all conspire to keep her majesty’s courtyard silent for the sweetly sleeping Queen. The attendants fail anew each day — a cuckoo clock or revue of grenadiers betrays them — and promptly move on to the next order of business: asking when (and who) their fair Louise will marry. Sylvania needs a loan, but foreign lenders demand a royal union to satisfy their investment. Enter womanizing military attaché Chevalier, the toast of Paris’s wandering wives, sent home by the state’s ambassador for a reprimand befitting his boudoir crimes.
Song ensues, some of the first in film. There is a spark between suitors, then discord, and finally resolution. But too often, the romantic match between MacDonald (or Miriam Hopkins, or Claudette Colbert) and Chevalier (or Jack Buchanan in Monte Carlo) is framed as a lesson more than a happy accident. In The Love Parade, the turning point occurs when Chevalier looks his philandering canine in the dog’s wet eyes and rues, “You’re the only one in the palace who looks up to me.” Whereupon the Prince embarks on a campaign of matrimonial humiliation, embarrassing and demeaning his lovely wife until MacDonald cedes power and authority (abroad and in bed) unequivocally to her husband. It is not enough that they fall in love; a battle of the sexes must be staged, won, reduced to rubble, and well salted.
A director with a clear enough sympathy to leave Claudette Colbert in a roomful of flowers congratulating her lover on his marriage to someone else is the Lubitsch of Trouble in Pardise, not The Smiling Lieutenant. Here, Chevalier catches himself in the simplest of screwball contradictions: the princess of Flausenthurm (Hopkins) mistakes a wink aimed at Colbert for a sovereign come-on. Against Colbert’s beer garden free spirit, Hopkins seems like the wrong choice for Chevalier, and although that’s the point for most of the movie, Hopkins is somehow the right choice for Chevalier in the end. “Jazz up your lingerie” is the most famous of Colbert’s lessons to the princess, but Colbert sacrificing Chevalier to a more fortuitous political match would be gentler if Chevalier didn’t seem to enjoy it so much. In Frank Capra’s perfect Platinum Blonde, Stew Smith (Robert Williams) remembers just in time that the woman he really loves is the tireless, funny Gallagher (Loretta Young). How could anyone see it differently?
In that sense, these films are less significant as musicals than as the transition from Lubitsch in Europe, where duty was the watchword of old-world romance, to the Lubitsch of the USA. If the right people don’t make a match, at least the possibility is there, so that, in the end, MacDonald’s dream belongs not to a day but to America. When Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis set off in search of California, Frank Tashlin filled farmers’ fields from coast to coast with beauties in gingham, buckskin, and denim. There is always a highway and always a woman, waving her hello or goodbye. Hollywood or Bust, but it is never the latter; what promise in the country if one can never move on?
The women of these early Lubitsch films are punished too cruelly for their independence, but the inevitable escape through which some regeneration transpires is nothing if not a new start out West. “It was lovely while it lasted” is a modern sentiment, even in 1931. Colbert pins it to her garter and leaves it on a table. For all the remove of fake European kingdoms and gentle mile-wide staircases from all-too-real Depression-era hard times, Lubitsch’s use of trains and travel is a grounded post-Jazz Age warm-up. From there, it was a sprint through the rest of the century.
What I remember most about Design for Living — the first Lubitsch film I ever saw — is the moment when Fredric March and Gary Cooper leave two tulips as a wedding gift for Miriam Hopkins. March is a writer and Cooper paints; they both love Hopkins, and she loves one and then the other on their rise to fortune and fame. The tulips are one last fuck-you from both of them, and it does the trick. Hopkins abandons sensible Edward Everett Horton and they all ride off together.
So Ernst Lubitsch did not pickle himself in the cynical divorce that supposedly informed so much of The Smiling Lieutenant and One Hour With You; his protagonists yet had time in the years to come to realize their mistakes and fix them. It is too bad that, after The Merry Widow, MacDonald was left behind. She, more than her men (Lubistch, Chevalier, the never-trimmer Eugene Pallette), makes this set invaluable. There is always another first (the first talkie, the first musical), but where would the movies be without women like her?