In Vienna, Lieutenant Nikolaus "Niki" von Preyn (Maurice Chevalier) meets Franzi (Claudette Colbert), the leader of an all-female-orchestra. They soon fall in love. While standing in formation at a parade honouring the visiting royal family of Flausenthurm, Niki winks at Franzi in the crowd. Unfortunately the gesture is intercepted by Anna, the Princess of Flausenthurm (Miriam Hopkins). The naive princess takes offence; to assuage her, the lieutenant insists that he winked and smiled at her because of her beauty. This backfires; charmed and besotted, Anna demands that she marry the lieutenant, and threatens to marry an American if this plan is thwarted. Franzi leaves Niki upon seeing him return in a royal carriage. After intervention by the Emperor of Austria, an international incident is narrowly averted by the marriage of the lieutenant and the princess, though the marriage is not consummated as Niki will only chastely kiss his bride—and his father-in-law.
Homesick and lovesick, Niki wanders the streets, and encounters Franzi, who has continued to perform with her orchestra in Flausenthurm since the wedding, unable to move on. The two resume their romance.
Anna finds out and confronts Franzi. During the confrontation, Franzi realizes that the princess is in fact deeply in love with the lieutenant. She decides to save the marriage by giving the dowdy princess a makeover, and they sing the duet "Jazz up your lingerie!" before Franzi departs for good.
The results are a complete success as the lieutenant returns home, follows his satin-clad, cigarette-puffing wife into the bedroom and closes the door – opening it briefly to give the audience a last song and suggestive wink.[1]
The film was not made under pleasant circumstances: the shift to the Astoria, New York, studios accounts for the sense of confinement on set.[2] Chevalier described performing – "smiles and cute winks of the eye" – a "mechanical display of technique" due to grief over his mother's death. Lubitsch also played referee between Colbert and Hopkins, who were determined to be shot from the same angle. Lubitsch encouraged their dispute that suited their characters on screen.[3]
The Smiling Lieutenant was Paramount's biggest grosser of 1931. Barrios claims that "Lubitsch and Chevalier were invincible".[2] It was also named the year's "Best Ten" by The New York Times, along with Charlie Chaplin's City Lights and F. W. Murnau's Tabu.[4]
Lubitsch was still in the stages of mastering sound-on-film technology and combining it with narrative: James Harvey acclaims that "technically The Smiling Lieutenant is the most accomplished of Lubitsch's early sound films. In sets, camerawork, background music, alternations of sound and silence, thus the film reaches a certain level that makes The Love Parade and Monte Carlo look comparatively stilted".[5] For Andrew Sarris, The Smiling Lieutenant stands between the "lilting lyricism" of Love Parade and the "tempered ironies"[6] in Trouble in Paradise.
Due to an ongoing copyright dispute with the silent-film version, The Smiling Lieutenant remained out of circulation for years and was considered as a lost film until a print was discovered in Denmark in the 1990s.[7] When the film resurfaced, the "general elation" was followed by "an inevitable let down" due to technical problems.[2]
"The Lubitsch Touch"
The notion of "The Lubitsch Touch" is used to describe the visual comment or joke that becomes a trademark or signature of Lubitsch's films.[8]Billy Wilder defines the touch in relation to The Smiling Lieutenant: "It was the elegant use of the Superjoke. You had a joke, and you felt satisfied, and then there was one more big joke on top of it. The joke you didn't expect. That was the Lubitsch touch." The ultimate Superjoke is that at the end of the film, "the wrong girl gets the man".[3]
References
^Green, Stanley (1999) Hollywood Musicals Year by Year (2nd ed.), pub. Hal Leonard Corporation ISBN0-634-00765-3 page 15
^ abcBarrios, Richard (1995). A Song In The Dark: The Birth of Musical Film, p. 344. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN0195088115.
^ abEyman, Scott (2000) "Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise. London", p. 169. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. ISBN0801865581.
^Hall, Mordaunt. "Blue-Ribbon Pictures of 1931: The Guardsman Heads List of Best Ten" The New York Times, New York, January 3, 1932.
^Harvey, James (1998) "Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges", p. 22. Da Capo Press, New York. ISBN0306808323.
^Sarris, Andrew (1972). "Lubitsch in the Thirties: All Talking! All Singing! All Lubitsch!", Film Comment 8, p. 21.
^Thompson, Kristin (2005) "Herr Lubitsch Goes To Hollywood: German and American Film After World War I", p. 126. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam. ISBN9053567089.
