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"A prince is, after all, only a human being," proclaims the feisty barmaid as if to Machiavelli, the imperial crown gives way to fraternity cap and sash. King Karl VII of Karlsburg (Gustav von Seyffertitz) augustly welcomes the nephew who will inherit the throne, out of the train steps a nestling in sailor suit and short pants, frightened by the cannonade in his honor. The castle's gates clank as heavily as a prison's, the prince (Ramon Novarro) reacts to news of a Heidelberg jaunt in a sustained close-up bubbling from raptness to glee. Beer gardens and college carousing comprise the rowdy idyll the cloistered blueblood only dreamed of, the innkeeper's daughter (Norma Shearer) downs a pitcher in a single gulp and at once he's in love. In this "place for youth" the broadminded tutor (Jean Hersholt) is a visitor, happily out of breath after spinning on the dance floor with a braided giantess. Seasons end, vacation's over: When the Prime Minister turns up with a reminder of the responsibilities tradition, it's with the inexorable grimness of Murnau's old chief-priest in Tabu. "Just one more day of life, and love." The operetta played by Ernst Lubitsch like a Beethoven sonata, a work of profound glück und verlust. Lovemaking on a hillside surrounded by flowers (complete with shooting star in the sky) is a fleeting utopia that lingers as memory or reverie only, the reality when revisited turns into a leafless trunk. (A vision of Shearer smiling with open arms is a reverse track that dissolves into a forward track of Novarro at the palace, something picked up by Hitchcock.) The obligations of royalty, the "damned good poison" of romance, the evanescence that levels them all. Various films flow from it, from Roman Holiday to Les Parapluies de Cherbourg to The Last Emperor. With Philippe De Lacy, Edgar Norton, and Bobbie Mack. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |