This is film 2 for the Letterboxd Season Challenge. The whole list of films I’m planning to watch is here.
Week 2: 1930s Musicals
Challenge: Watch an unseen 1930s musical
Film I Chose: The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), directed by Ernst Lubitsch
We’re totally in my wheelhouse doing 1930s musicals, so much so that I had to go much more obscure than the Fred/Ginger and Busby Berkeley films many other Challengers are doing (though if you haven’t seen those, that’s absolutely the way to go). Instead I went for a Pre-Code Lubitsch/Chevalier musical I hadn’t seen.
Chevalier plays Nikki, a lieutenant in the Austrian army who’s something of a womanizer (his opening song, sung direct to camera, talks about how it’s “toujours l’amour in the army” and how much the ladies enjoy his ra-ta-ta-ta-ta, a double meaning for a trumpet fanfare), until he meets Franzie (Claudette Colbert), a violinist who quickly dumps Charles Ruggles in favor of Chevalier. The plot thickens when Nikki winks at Franzie while on duty as an entourage from a neighboring country drives through and the princess Anna (Miriam Hopkins) thinks he was winking at her and soon wants to marry him.