Eclipse Series 8 Lubitsch Musicals The Love Parade The Smiling Lieutenant One Hour with You Monte Carlo The Criterion Collection

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. 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.