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"Here's a puzzle. And, believe me, it's hot." The wedding is dampened, first by rain and then by a Dear John letter that leaves the Duke (Claud Allister) to warble "She'll Love Me and Like It" to an unmoved audience. The runaway bride is the Countess (Jeanette MacDonald), headstrong and superstitious and down to her last few thousand francs but determined to begin anew in Monte Carlo. (Her song of emancipation harmonizes with the whistling locomotive, "beyond the blue horizon lies a rising sun.") The "dictates of society" cramp her newfound freedom, the pose must be maintained, that's the tragedy and the comedy of Ernst Lubitsch's characters. "I'll build you castles, dear, beyond compare." "I fear you're building castles in the air." Her suitor (Jack Buchanan) is a blueblood posing as a hairdresser ("You could make an indoor sport of trimmin' the women," cf. Ashby's Shampoo), he wins her affection by massaging her forehead but no fewer than three keys lock up her desire. The technique advances markedly on The Love Parade to capture the afterglow of a date or to connect lovers on different floors with a craning camera, Lubitsch's sound experiments continue with Zasu Pitts' muttering tabulations and "Give Me a Moment Please" sung over a telephone and whistled in the park. Clockwork figurines have a go at "Always in All Ways," the Stroheim hunchback outside the casino charges for the stroke of luck. "That's what you get for being nice to your servants." Monsieur Beaucaire at the opera house elucidates the dilemma, the untangling of emotions in tandem with a libretto rewritten for a happy ending. "Oh, a silly story, possible only with music" and gravely analyzed by Rohmer (The Marquise of O). With Tyler Brooke, John Roche, and Lionel Belmore. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |