(90 mins.) Released 1930-08-27
Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Stars: Jeanette MacDonald, Jack Buchanan, Claud Allister, Zasu Pitts
comedy, musical, romance
originally posted 24 Sep 2017 23:19
Jeanette MacDonald introduces her theme song, and my favorite of hers, Beyond the Blue Horizon. Jack Buchanan appears only once more in my collection, as the egotistical theatre director/star in The Band Wagon (1953), and I've seen him in a music/comedy short or two. Zasu Pitts is a welcome sight, underutilized here.
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I like the way the conflict is resolved by injecting an opera with plot parallel to our movie. In fact, this movie is loosely based on the Booth Tarkington novel (1900) that was also source for the Rudolf Valentino drama Monsieur Beaucaire (1924) and the Bob Hope comedy Monsieur Beaucaire (1946). And there really is an English operetta (1918) based on the book, composed by André Messager. If you squint at the poster outside the opera, it seems to say the opera is by A. Messager.
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JM is very appealing here as a runaway bride torn between money and love. JB is charming enough to be the love interest, or perhaps she just sells it enough to convince me.
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Plenty of songs, no dancing, lots of farce. Worth it for the bookend renditions of Blue Horizon on a train alone; I can feel the wind in my hair.
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Surprising bit of history: they had hand-held blowdryers in 1930!
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Paramount, dir. Lubitsch; 7
