Product Description

Not only the man who refined Hollywood comedy with such masterpieces as Trouble in Paradise, The Shop Around the Corner, and To Be or Not to Be, Ernst Lubitsch also helped invent the modern movie musical. With the advent of sound and audiences clamoring for talkies, Lubitsch combined his love of European operettas and his mastery of film to produce this entirely new genre. These elegant, bawdy films, created before strict enforcement of the morality code, feature some of the greatest stars of early Hollywood (Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, Claudette Colbert, Miriam Hopkins), as well as that elusive style of comedy that would thereafter be known as the Lubitsch touch.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16075 in DVD
• Brand: Image Entertainment
• Released on: 2008-02-12
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Box set, Black & White, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 4
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 368 minutes

Amazon.com
Ernst Lubitsch enjoyed one of the brightest directorial careers of the 1920s and '30s, so much so that "the Lubitsch touch" became a household phrase--an ineffable meringue of visual wit and flawless timing, ribald humor and emotional delicacy, and a genius for planting all manner of naughty notions in his viewers' minds without doing or showing anything censorable. So much charm, style, and inventiveness, yet video distributors have largely neglected his films, especially the ones that helped establish Paramount Pictures as the most cosmopolitan studio in Hollywood. How much more gratifying, then, that the folks at Criterion who first made Trouble in Paradise (1932) available on DVD have bundled Lubitsch's four early-sound musicals in their admirable Eclipse series. This wonderful quartet of still-saucy and beguiling comedies provides bounteous entertainment while also defining a period in film history--and constituting a monument to a director who knew there should be more to "the talkies" than mere talking.

And more to screen musicals than mere "all-singing, all-dancing," which is what lured ticket-buyers at the dawn of movie sound. Instead of the clomping chorus lines and stagebound song-selling of The Broadway Melody and its ilk, Lubitsch created the film operetta, in which song numbers grew out of the characters' behavior and took place in "natural" spaces, and the rhythms and patterns of "normal" dialogue were themselves often musical in stylization. But that's only part of it. Lubitsch also composed a kind of visual music, building motifs through the rhythmic recurrence of staircases, doorways, windows--frames within frames. And then he syncopated it all through the editing, cutting for visual rhymes as well as comic surprise.

His first sound film, The Love Parade (1929), was a sensation with critics, audiences, and Hollywood itself, earning Academy Award nominations for picture, director, and actor Maurice Chevalier. Chevalier plays a nobleman recalled to his mythical Mittel-European land of Sylvania after his extracurricular activities in Paris while serving as a diplomatic envoy lead to scandal. The rake is soon joined in a marriage of convenience with Sylvania's queen, played by newcomer Jeanette MacDonald. Banish all thoughts of those treacly MGM musicals with Nelson Eddy that came half a decade later; this Jeanette MacDonald has spirit and sex appeal to burn, and Queen Louise's imperious manner toward a husband ill-made for the role of prince consort sets off a droll battle of the sexes. At a running time of 112 minutes there are some longueurs, but the stars are in splendid form, and they get yeoman backup from the sparkling Lillian Roth and astonishingly limber music-hall comic Lupino Lane as a couple of servants. Lubitsch, already established in silent films as the master of innuendo with closed boudoir doors, continues his censor-defying tricks with sound: among other things, allowing the punchline of a ribald joke to be heard, but not Chevalier's lead-up to it, seen in elaborate pantomime through a distant window. (Note: Victor Schertzinger's song "Dream Lover," introduced in this movie, would do evocative duty--mostly uncredited--on the soundtracks of numerous Paramount films of the '30s and '40s.)

Monte Carlo, unlike Sylvania, is a real place, but that's beside the point; all the films in this set unreel in a Europe of the Berlin-born Lubitsch's own imagining, adroitly realized by the Paramount art department under Hans Dreier. Monte Carlo also happens to be the title of Lubitsch's second musical (1930), which teams the director again with Jeanette MacDonald but not Chevalier (busy on other Paramount projects). She's a scatterbrained countess who's stepped out of her wedding gown to avoid marrying a silly-ass duke (Claude Allister) and hopped the first train handy--especially handy, given that she's in her lingerie. The Chevalier part is taken by Scottish-born musical comedy star Jack Buchanan, playing a count who decides to romance her in the guise of a hairdresser. As scripted by Ernest Vajda, this is very much not a romance of equals--the man always has the upper hand and the last laugh--yet the strapping MacDonald looks as if she could thrash the reedy Buchanan within an inch of his life. The film's greatest claim to fame is its bravura, still-exhilarating "Beyond the Blue Horizon" sequence, in which MacDonald sings that song out the window of her train compartment and everything in the known world, from the chug-chugging engine to the fringe quivering on the windowshade to entire sunny fields populated with farmworkers, joins in ecstatic support of the melody. A landmark sequence; and yet the movie's most magical instance of the Lubitsch touch is a quiet moment with the countess striding in profile through a Monte Carlo park one evening, a man stepping up to flirt with her, a cutaway to his friend as an offscreen slap is heard, and back to a shot of the countess still in profile, still striding, unperturbed, her rhythm unbroken. Sublime.

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) is an especially welcome element of the set, given that it was for many years thought to have been lost. It also marks a salutary advance over the previous films, as Lubitsch's first collaboration with writer Samson Raphaelson; Raphaelson became the director's most invaluable creative partner, the two working in such harmony that Raphaelson proposed some of the most "Lubitschean" visual ideas in their films and Lubitsch came up with some of the funniest lines. Raphaelson may also have been instrumental in nudging the director toward a more egalitarian sexual politics--something to be applauded not out of political correctness but because comedy between equally matched parties tends to be much richer and funnier than comedy at the expense of one person (or gender), as in Monte Carlo. The Smiling Lieutenant builds toward the unlikely but very satisfying collusion of the two women in playboy-officer Maurice Chevalier's life, played by Claudette Colbert at her most exquisite (in normally verboten left profile!) and Miriam Hopkins, who would go on to shine for Lubitsch in Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living (1933). (As an early promissory note on those great performances, savor her self-introduction as the daughter of the King of Flausenthurm: "I may be a princess, but I'm also a girl!")

Nineteen-thirty-two was a busy year for Lubitsch. Besides the antiwar film The Man I Killed, an episode in the omnibus film If I Had a Million, and his masterpiece Trouble in Paradise, he made the fourth film in the Eclipse set, One Hour With You. On this, his final Paramount musical, he cut himself some slack. First, it's a remake of his first truly Lubitschean film in Hollywood, the 1924 silent comedy of infidelity The Marriage Circle; for another thing, the initial plan was that George Cukor should direct following Lubitsch's detailed instructions. That didn't fly, and soon Lubitsch took over, completed the picture, and denied Cukor any credit (credit Cukor still felt he deserved decades later). However fraught the production may have been, One Hour With You emerged as a delightful musical comedy, with Chevalier and MacDonald together again as André and Colette, a high-society Parisian couple with a perfect marriage--till Colette's girlhood pal Mitzi (Genevieve Tobin) sets out to seduce André. The film boasts the catchiest song score of the bunch--especially when Chevalier is confiding his temptations directly to the audience, which happens frequently. Like The Love Parade and The Smiling Lieutenant, One Hour With You was nominated for the Academy Award as best picture of its year.

Each film in Lubitsch Musicals has been impeccably transferred to DVD. The prints are crisp and luminous (apart from some shots of MacDonald on the train in Monte Carlo), and in the case of the three earliest titles, something quite rare: the DVDs preserve the early-sound frame ratio of 1.20:1. Yes, it's momentarily startling to encounter this tall format--most of all in the hilariously iconic representation of "Paris" that opens The Love Parade--but distraction soon gives way to deep satisfaction at seeing the original design and composition of Lubitsch's shots. As usual with Eclipse offerings, there are no extras on the DVDs, but the liner notes are models of lucidity, critically and historically. --Richard T. Jameson

Customer Reviews

Some of the great musicals of the precode/early talkie era.
Starting with the dawn of sound until the birth of the modern movie musical around 1934, audiences suffered through musicals that were so bad that they were cheesy such as 1930's "Golden Dawn" and the just plain awful such as the inexplicable "Howdy Broadway". A cut - or maybe two - above the rest were the musicals Ernst Lubitsch made at Paramount. This set is the debut of those musicals on DVD. They include:

The Love Parade (1929) - stars Jeanette MacDonald as the queen of a mythical country and Maurice Chevalier as her new husband, Renard. Renard, whose background has been that of a free-wheeling philanderer finds his new position as consort quite constraining. Nominated for Best Picture Oscar.

Monte Carlo (1930) - stars Jeanette MacDonald this time as a status-rich cash-poor Countess. She falls in love with someone she thinks is a hairdresser and decides to marry a wealthy member of the gentry to improve her financial position, which is desperate. However, she later finds out her hairdresser is not who she thinks he is. Enjoyable and above average, but probably the weakest of the four films.

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) - Chevalier is back, this time in the title role. His smile, meant for his girlfriend, is intercepted by a noblewoman. He is forced into a marriage with this noblewoman. However, afterwards the girlfriend shows the new wife how to win her husband's love. This is a great precode and was nominated for Best Picture.

One Hour with You (1932) - Reteams Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier. This time Chevalier is the pursued rather than the pursuer as he is Andre, the happily married husband of Colette (MacDonald). Collette's friend Mitzi pursues Andre relentlessly, and he gives in. Likewise, Colette can't resist a man in pursuit of her. Throw in Mitzi's jealous husband, and you have Andre confessing his transgression to his wife and hoping for her forgiveness. Nominated for Best Picture.

Lubitsch was one of the few people making musicals in 1931 and 1932 because the genre was so out of favor due to early poor entries. Watch these four musicals full of great precode sauciness and sophistication and find out why the Lubitsch touch is the stuff of legends.

Expensive set for the connisseur
This collection of pre-code Ernst Lubitsch comedy/musicals is a welcome addition to the gems which continue to appear on DVD. Ernst Lubitsch was the master of the bedroom comedy, with a famous and recognisable touch towards matters sexual which became the benchmark for many famous directors, notably Billy Wilder.

"The Love Parade", released in 1929, became the prototype of the Lubitsch musical which culminated with "The Merry Widow" in 1934, to which it has many similarities. The film stars the debonair Maurice Chevalier as an ambassador who marries luminous Jeanette Macdonald, queen of Sylvania, in her film debut. Macdonald became for a brief time the queen of the bedroom farce, long before MGM paired her with Nelson Eddy and systematically removed her sense of fun. In this film, her makeup obscures her lush beauty but no one could match her balance of sexinesss and insouciance. The film broke away from the backstage conventions of the early talkie musicals and contributed significantly to the liberation of the camera from the inertia which talkies initially brought. The print is very good.

As a follow up, Macdonald was starred in 1930 in "Monte Carlo" with the British Jack Buchanan who is no Chevalier. Buchanan has an effeminate quality which detracts from the romance. The plot is a take off of Monsieur Beaucaire, a countess falling in love with a count impersonating her hairdresser. The best moment is the staging of MacDonald in a train singing "Beyond the Blue Horizon", a song she kept in her repertoire for the rest of her life. The film is a showcase for her and she is animated and funny. The print is generally excellent but the soundtrack comes and goes at times as the actors move away from the microphone.

In 1931, "The Smiling Lieutenant" brings back Chevalier in another marital musical farce whereby he is mistaken for flirting with dowdy princess Miriam Hopkins and ordered to marry her to avoid an international scandal. Claudette Colbert plays his saucy girlfriend, a violinist with an all girl band. Colbert eventually meets the princess, takes pity on her and teaches her to "jazz up her lingerie" to attract Chevalier. The film is filled with visual tricks, smutty innuendo, particularly around Colbert's ability with her hands, and some lively songs. Colbert reveals an adequate singing voice. All the leads are terrific and the print is really excellent.

"One Hour with You" for 1932 is a remake of an earlier Lubitsch Silent and is another bedroom farce with Chevalier caught between wife Jeanette MacDonald and her girlfriend Genevieve Tobin, in rhyming couplets. The film in fact was originally directed by George Cukor but Lubitsch was not satisfied with the results and apparantly reshot much of the footage. There are some charming songs and, once again, lots of sexy innuendo. MacDonald is radiant here and her scenes with the superb Tobin are hilarious. Charles Ruggles and Roland Young are on hand too in support of the leads and are perfect as always. The print is OK.

All of these films contributed to Paramount Studios reputation as the most sophisticated of the studios. While they were critical successes, only "The Love Parade" really was an all out smash hit. The set is expensive but has no extras except some good notes on the inside sleeve of each DVD. This is disappointing given they are more worthy of preservation than many more famous box office hits.

Where It All Began
Ernst Lubitsch is the great director who pretty much invented the sophisticated, adult film comedy, but he also pretty much invented the film musical as we now know it. I saw the first and most famous of these 4 films, THE LOVE PARADE, on TCM a while ago, and I immediately looked for a DVD of it, but there wasn't one until now. The wonderful folks at Criterion have put Lubitsch's 4 early musicals together in one great package, and it is delightful. It is also an important chapter in the history of film. LOVE PARADE (1929) was the first full-length sound film with songs incorporated into the story, and it was such a big hit that Paramount followed it up with the other 3 in this collection.

Just about every musical film director owes something to Lubitsch, from the early sound period right up to the present. Watch these 4 movies, and you will see the earliest examples of a whole lot of musical film conventions that we now take for granted. You'll also see great performances by Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, Jack Buchanan, Claudette Colbert, and Miriam Hopkins. And you'll find out where several famous songs were first introduced, including "Dream Lover," "Give Me A Moment, Please," and "Beyond the Blue Horizon." Who knew? I sure didn't--but I'm glad I found out. Any fan of film history--especially musicals--should find this collection fascinating. Highly recommended.