The Merry Widow

More love for the Lubitsch touch. This is the sort of musical I like best, I suppose: the American musical before the Big Hollywood musical. I’m not really sure how to account for the difference, but already between something like this and the 1936 Show Boat the shift has occurred. This sort of thing is more light, playful, romantic, less mannered and aware of its cleverness, more like the Jerome Kern kind of musical produced contemporaneously with BHMs that I like much better.

Anyway, Lubitsch is hilarious. His comedy works so well not because it is broad and obvious, as my blurb on Trouble might have indicated (”suffused through every frame”): in fact it succeeds through economy. The best jokes are when the audience cannot see the whole joke: two characters talk about what they’re doing under the table; the camera stays on the character who’s narrating a lover’s spat which would be foreground action in any other movie. In so many ways, he seems to take a conventional sort of moment, that has its place in any romantic comedy, and turns it on its head: how does everyone else do it? let’s do it differently.

Add to that, Jeanette MacDonald & Maurice Chevalier have joined the ranks of my Great Screen Couples — though I’ve only seen them in two costarring vehicles now, I have to say both are just pure charm, and their charms are in perfect harmony. Maurice Chevalier is definitely the sexiest ugly man in history. I’m pretty crazy about him.