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The dancing camera, the active eye, the complicit Max Ophüls gaze: It begins in between acts at the opera house (Seraglio is heard), a glimpse through the hole in the curtain establishes the Viennese aristocracy in their seats, a reflection of the movie audience eager for drama and music. The Emperor arrives, but the focus is on the brush between the young lieutenant (Wolfgang Liebeneiner) and the working-class soubrette (Magda Schneider). He's guilty of having "too much luck with women" and she's so bashful that her voice wavers during her Brahms recital, the two pledge eternal romance while sledding through snowy woods, poignantly unaware that evanescence is already the filmmaker's recurring theme. At the café, the lovers swoon to the waltz tinkling out of a coin-operated Victrola, and it's paradise; at the lavish mansion, a full orchestra swells as the officer dances with the Baroness he's no longer interested in (Olga Tschechowa), and it's just a mechanical pirouette. A second couple (Carl Esmond, Luise Ullrich) completes the Mozartian arrangement, the intruding figure is the Baron (Gustaf Gründgens) who glares through his monocle, exhales cigarette smoke like a dragon, and chooses pistols at dawn. Militarist strictures versus emotional impulses, the Arthur Schnitzler scenario receives the pianissimo Ophüls treatment with caressing tracking shots that are actually outlines of the characters' class and gender cages. The philandering officer stepping out of the theater mid-performance is a joke admired by Lubitsch in To Be or Not to Be, Bergman in Smiles of a Summer Night adumbrates the gentlemanly-cloddish duel. "The political situation" is playfully alluded to, but this is 1933 Germany, perilous times for critiquing macho codes and having somebody declare that "every shot not fired in self-defense is murder." Cinematography by Franz Planer. With Paul Hörbiger, Werner Finck, and Paul Otto. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |