The Smetana comic opera, with all its expansive earthiness played like a piccolo for the earliest traces of Max Ophüls' rhapsodic lilt. The Czech village of the libretto is erected around Munich, and as the story begins the circus is led into it by clown-ringmaster Karl Valentin, whose Pierrot figure would be later made sardonic by Brecht, Bergman, Fellini. The plebeian hero (Willy Domgraf-Fassbaender) goes to buy a new wagon wheel and instead finds love at the fairgrounds, although the maiden (Jarmila Novotna) looking for her stray piglet turns out to be the daughter of the burgermeister, promised to be married ("bartered," rather) to somebody else -- "Alles ist so gut wie richtig," the marriage broker (Otto Wernicke) sings, the heroine refuses and dashes out, seeking her true love. The runaway couple is a knowing travesty of stock operetta juveniles, yet Ophüls breathes into these plastic figurines the genuine ardor of yearning: Ducking into a carnival tent, the lovers are suddenly treated to a romantic ballad ("Das ist treue Liebe") and morbid panels, the first of the grinning skulls (cf. Le Plaisir) lurking under the filmmaker's soigné frivolity. Lubitsch is the model (Monte Carlo, mainly), the camera tracks through an open window and glides over a gingerbread village; the characters weave their enchanted affairs until they're brought together at Valentin's circus show, met by Chaplin's (later Renoir's) bear and none other than Max Nosferatu Schreck in full Apache makeup. "Ah, love's sweet dream." Stillness is dangerous in Ophüls' world, Domgraf-Fassbaender and Novotna pose for a picture and are nearly caught; Ophüls nevertheless accelerates the comic rhythm until it approaches the centrifugal, then freezes it into a celebratory memento. With Paul Kemp, Annemarie Sörensen, Hermann Kner, and Maria Janowska. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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