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"Have you ever had diplomatic relations with a woman?" A country that requires a magnifying glass on the map, a figure in mournful black who punctuates the jollity of the opening parade. The widow (Jeanette MacDonald) has a melancholia that can silence gypsy violins, the playboy (Maurice Chevalier) climbs over the garden wall but cannot see through her veil, "not terrific" is her verdict, "not even colossal." (Their song is performed long distance, she warbles from the balcony while he plays Cyrano to a dubbed Sterling Holloway.) "There's a limit to every widow" so she packs her bags and leaves for Paris, bad news for the national economy since she's responsible for fifty-two percent of taxes. Chevalier's amorous captain is entrusted with seducing her back by the King (George Barbier), who knows he's the right man for the mission after finding him in the royal boudoir with the Queen (Una Merkel). (The wrong unbuckled sword belt gives the extramarital discovery behind closed doors in a characteristic sleight of hand.) The City of Lights sets the stage for the clash of carnal ephemerality and romantic commitment. "Here they are—all your little tonights and not a tomorrow among them." Not Stroheim's Lehár but Ernst Lubitsch's, at once the culmination of his risqué operettas and an elegy for the vanishing subgenre in the face of encroaching censorship. Cavernous MGM creaminess, inscribed garter belts, kaleidoscopic ballrooms. Scorsese in The Age of Innocence remembers the foreplay beneath Napoleon's portrait. "Great man. His only mistake was he attacked too early." Out of the cabaret and into the tribunal, lothario and heiress acquainted at last. "Would you be good enough to remove all the livestock from the courtroom?" Lubitsch pulls it all together to a waltz in the dungeon cell, and Ophüls takes it from there. With Edward Everett Horton, Minna Gombell, Ruth Channing, Donald Meek, and Herman Bing. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |