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Casanova's capitulation, or perhaps the splitting of Eve, in any case a marvelous suite of symbols (bugle, violin, tea time, schnitzel, piano, checkers...). Maurice Chevalier is the eponymous roué, invited as a cohort to a comrade's (Charles Ruggles) attempted seduction of the fiddler in the beer garden (Claudette Colbert). A comment ("You know who she reminds me of? Your wife") is enough to throw Ruggles off his game, his finger-tapping interrupts the lady's concert, she goes home with Chevalier. Ernst Lubitsch pays tribute to Mallarmé ("Breakfast Table Love"), then offers a great encapsulation of the graceful, stifling pose that is his theme—the monarch visiting from Flausenthurm (George Barbier), trying to keep up his royal bearing in the train as a cattle wagon rattles past the window. A scandal breaks out when the lieutenant's smile at his beloved accidentally lands on the dowdy princess (Miriam Hopkins), whose offence quickly melts as she learns of this odd thing called flirting. Arranged wedding, ceremonial bedchamber (cf. Rossellini's La Prise de Pouvoir par Louis XIV), unconsummated honeymoon. "Married people don't wink?" "Oh no! Not at each other." A recomposition of The Love Parade, in a glissando rhythm that never softens the melancholy cruelty of the tale: What is harsher than helping give away the one you love? Colbert's lesson in sexiness to Hopkins ("Jazz up your lingerie, just like a melody...") is followed by her walk down the corridor and out of the film, Hitchcock has Barbara Bel Geddes reenact it in Vertigo. The newlyweds are restored after silky pegnoirs replace bulky bloomers, still it's the self-sacrificing violinist's lament that lingers. "It was lovely while it lasted." With Hugh O'Connell, Harry C. Bradley, and Elizabeth Patterson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |