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She (Mae Murray) is a dancer with The Manhattan Follies, a crucial aspect in Erich von Stroheim's expansion of the Lehár operetta. Her traveling troupe shares a roadside garrison with a military regiment in mythical Monteblanco, and there she is sandwiched between two starched uniforms at the dinner table, lascivious noblemen posing as commoners. The crown prince (Roy D'Arcy) ruthlessly wields leer and monocle, his cousin (John Gilbert) is called "the world's champion of indoor sports," a "despoiler" but willing to be redeemed. At the opera house, she pirouettes under a spotlight and is devoured by various camera-binoculars, her feet, torso and visage isolated in voyeuristic irises. (Later on, her figure morphs into a silhouette to set off the sparkle of her jewelry.) The decrepit fetishist (Tully Marshall) is repulsed by other hoofers' shoes but lights up at the sight of the heroine's dainty heels, which scamper away like frightened doves. The canceled wedding is the midpoint, the showgirl turns mourning baroness. "Well, what has marriage got to do with love," asks the king (George Fawcett), promptly answered by the queen (Josephine Crowell) who has her own tale of tragic romance. A Stroheim specialty, the emotion laid bare by a lingering camera—a rare dolly-in fashions a Vermeer close-up just as love passes into vengeance. The flypaper on the lavish cushion, the bullet in the marble statue, the gnarled corpse on the honeymoon bed. "Nice little place. Nice little pigs. Nice little women." The immediate influence is on Renoir (Nana), Ophüls in De Mayerling à Sarajevo registers the heart's place in the imperial state. Pistols at dawn, the valse remembered: "I must finish an interrupted dance from long ago..." A happy ending in store, courtesy of an assassination. Nine years later, the withering farce becomes Lubitsch's coruscating elegy. Cinematography by Oliver Marsh, William Daniels, and Ben Reynolds. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |