There are many great film directors, but not one has ever been able to create the kind of sexual energy that Lubitsch puts into all his films. Lubitsch's characters explode with life, the joy of being young and in love. There's nothing dirty or smutty whatsoever in the Lubitsch Touch, as there is sometimes in the work of his disciple Billy Wilder.
THE SMILING LIEUTENANT TORRENT FULL
When they burst out in song, as they do on the slightest provocation in a Lubitsch musical, it is because they are full of emotions they can no longer contain. For once in a film, you actually feel that these extremely attractive young people can hardly wait to go to bed with each other, and when they do (off-screen of course) the result is transformative. It's all done with innuendo and the extraordinary degree of energy and physical magnetism that Lubitsch manages to elicit from all his actors. PARADE two years earlier, and the result is an utterly charming film that was box-office hit.There is more real sexuality between male and female in five minutes of a Lubitsch musical than in two and a half hours of any average film you're likely to see today. This was the noted French entertainer's first work together with master director Lubitsch after their successful collaboration on THE LOVE Hopkins, meanwhile, enjoyed herįirst major opportunity to display her considerable comic prowess as the princess in need of a makeover, and Chevalier is in his best and most typical form. Colbert-warm, sweet, with touches of sadness-is in wonderful form, and proves to be a fine singer to boot. Your Lingerie." Made and released during the Depression, THE SMILING LIEUTENANT offered welcome escapism for a public reeling under too real economic woes. The music is delightful, and the songs include such bon-bons as "Spruce Up The operetta plot bears little resemblance to reality, but the players are so good, the dialogue (by Lubitsch, Ernest Vajda and Samson Raphaelson) so witty, and the direction so skillful that no one minds the logic lapses. Niki refuses to consummate their marriage, however-that is, untilįranzi does a makeover job on Anna that sends the guardsman's head reeling. When Niki protests that he finds the princess attractive, she falls in love with him, and in no time, bound by his duty to his country, he finds himself married to her. During a state visit to the Austrian capital by King Adolf (George Barbier), his desperately plain daughter, Princess Anna (Miriam Hopkins), mistakenly believes that the smile Niki has intended for Franzi was actually directed in her royal direction,īut is convinced the handsome soldier is only being kind.
With Franzi (Claudette Colbert), a violinist. The delightful story is set in Vienna, where Niki (Chevalier), an officer of the Royal Guards, shares romance and an apartment Studios, and made this musical as well as a French-language version, LE LIEUTENANT SOURIANT, with the same cast working from a new French script by Jacques Bataille-Henri. Only six years after the release of EIN WALZERTRAUM, the 1925 German silent based on the operetta inspired by Hans Muller's novel Nux, der Prinzgemahl, Ernst Lubitsch gathered Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert and Miriam Hopkins, moved them into Paramount's Astoria, Long Island,
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