The Merry Widow is probably my favorite of Lubitsch’s film. Until recently it didn’t get much love from film critics and historians, compared with many other Lubitsch comedies. I suspect that was because it appeared to many folks to be just the final sigh of the Jeanette Macdonald-Maurice Chevalier Ruritanian frou-frou musical farces, and it came weirdly after the suave non-musical modern comedies like Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living. Trouble is still considered Lubitsch’s masterpiece, and if that’s the story you’re sticking to, it’s hard to see The Merry Widow as anything but a regression. But it looks like things are changing, and film historians are beginning to place the Widow closer to the top.
The film is easier to love when you don’t think about the context too much. The Merry Widow has been an archetypal operetta since it was first produced in 1905. It is being staged somewhere in the world at any given time. It is performed every year by the Vienna Volksopera, and many of its tunes remain Schlager standards. It has been filmed several times, including once back in 1918 by Michael Curtiz when he was still Mihály Kertész in Hungary (I can’t find a print of it anywhere), and a monumental silent by Eric von Stroheim in 1925. Studios loved it because it was sure to make money. It wasn’t originally Lubitsch’s idea to make the film (it was studio head Irving Thalberg’s) — but it was clearly in Lubitsch’s wheelhouse: a Viennese operetta that was half-Hungarian (the composer Lehár’s mother was Hungarian and Magyar was literally his mother-tongue) and so well known Lubitsch could feel free to recreate it at will. Still under contract to Paramount, Lubitsch was loaned to Thalberg’s MGM, an important point because MGM spent lots more money on its films than Paramount — and, more important for my purposes, MGM still allows clips of its films to be reproduced on the Net, unlike Paramount clips, which are owned and controlled by Disney-like Universal Studios. (Now that Jeff Bezos has bought MGM, who knows how long that freedom will last?) Macdonald and Chevalier had made two films for Lubitsch before, as well as Rouben Mamoulian’s Lubitsch-esque Love Me Tonight, and neither was happy about working together again. The film was the most expensive musical of its time — consider its $1.6 million outlay next to the $429k of 42nd Street and the $433k of Gold Diggers of 1933. It made a lot of money but did not recoup its production costs. It was far more successful in Europe and Latin America than in the US. Apparently, US audiences didn’t want to see all that abstract gaiety in the darkest years of the Depression, and midwesterners complained that Chevalier’s accent was unintelligible. Tastes were becoming decidedly more American. How could a fantasy Europe compete with Busby Berkeley and Fred & Ginger, who were making cinematic history with The Golddiggers of 1933 and The Gay Divorcee at the same time?
All that is really just noise for me. The Merry Widow, taken on its own, is the consummation of Lubitsch’s early sound aesthetic. If Trouble in Paradise displays all of his devices in stripped-down form, the Widow shows them in regalia. One could completely immerse oneself in the amazing music, the way the underscore truly does underscore all the action and emotions. (Lubitsch basically invented the model for musical commentary in comic sound film.) One could just as easily lose oneself in the visual designs — the costumes, mise-en-scène, the brilliant white sets that eclipse RKO’s great white sets made famous by Astaire and Rogers, and especially the cinematography and lighting of Oliver Marsh, who had also filmed Stroheim’s silent version. For my part, I love the Widow especially because it plays the phallus game as well as it can be played. From beginning to end, it’s a carnival of comic fetishes.
The script alters the original operetta’s story in many significant ways. Danilo (Chevalier) is a dashing royal guard officer and a count, not a prince in line for the Marshovian throne, and he and the widow have never met when the action begins. The widow Sonia (MacDonald), still in mourning for her late magnate husband (on whose riches the imaginary Balkan country of Marshovia has depended), cherishes her solitude. Lubitsch erases his protagonists’ weighty personal pasts (they had been lovers before her marriage in the operetta), and allows things to develop from scratch. The ladies’ man Danilo is intrigued by the rich widow hidden behind her veil, and embarks on his seduction by climbing over her garden wall.
Right from the start we have dueling archetypal fetishistic supplements: Sonia’s black veil (the veil is probably the original fetish, after all) and Danilo’s assortment of military ornaments — shako, ribbon, saber, brass buttons, insignia, epaulets, and the little medal dangling from his collar. Whenever we see Lubitsch’s silly military uniforms, it’s good to keep in mind Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni’s famous axiom: “If the penis were the phallus, men would have no need of feathers or ties or medals.” Displacement works on the core story level, too — Sonia is a widow bereft of male support, but she has all the dough, and we know at the outset that concealed behind the mourning veil is a woman who is “merry.” Danilo, for his part, scales her wall only to present a letter to her in which he speaks of himself in the third person. Later he will join Sonia’s “Vilia” aria through his aide de camp’s voice, pretending that it’s his. Nothing but indirection and supplements.
For his part, Lubitsch conceals nothing about the fetish game. As Sonia works hard to forget Danilo, Lubitsch shows her longing expressed in a fantastical collection of core female fetishes, whole closets devoted to veils, shoes, gowns, corsets, and lapdogs, which miraculously and hilariously change from appropriately funereal black to gay white as soon as she decides to escape to Paris.
And in quintessential Lubitsch fashion, the missing fetish in this series of magical transformations, the juiciest one, the corset, appears on the widow herself, signifying not only the frilly undergarment, but Jeanette Macdonald herself as an object of desire; her appearance in lingerie was so iconic by this point in her career that Lubitsch makes a camp image of her image — not incidentally challenging the Hays Code head-on in the first year of its real enforcement. (The history of The Merry Widow‘s relationship with the Code censors is worth a study in its own right.)
In an equally hilarious scene which fun-house-mirrors Sonia’s in a masculine key, King Achmed (George Barbier) consults with his Queen Dolores (Una Merkel) about how to repatriate Sonia’s money to Marshovia. In case we weren’t paying attention to the phallus, Lubitsch brings it front and center.
More structural indirection. Danilo and his saber stand tall and erect, not so much to guard over Queen Dolores as to keep watch for the propitious moment to join her inside. When King Achmed realizes that he’s mistakenly picked up another man’s saber in his wife’s bedroom and storms back in, we expect a serious confrontation and some in flagrante. Instead, the clearly cuckolded king wants to make sure that there will be no scandal. He wants to cover things up. And Danilo suggests that they pretend to be sociable, which leads to nonsensical mumbling conversation — non-words that mean nothing covering up nothing. And it continues, as the king, the queen, and the captain of the guards talk at apparent cross-purposes, each taking control of the conversational exchanges for their own purposes, and yet everyone gets what they really want. It’s pretty dazzling.
And then, a 180o flip. The scene shifts to Paris, and Maxim’s, the high-end can-can parlor where Danilo is a patron cherished by all the jeunes filles. Here the masculine comic fetishes might as well be mourning clothes. For a moment — you can miss it if you blink — Lubitsch shows us the male counterpart to Sonia’s closets in the hat check rack and the arrayed top hats, well-established symbols of well-heeled masculine social power, drab and identical.
Here Danilo literally runs into Popov (Edward Everett Horton, in one of his best roles), the Marshovian ambassador entrusted to fix Danilo up with Sonia. Two archetypal comic males doing what comic males do best: challenging each other to a duel and swearing bosom friendship to a countryman.
And into this happy male preserve of dancing girls, top hats, and tuxedos steps Sonia, resplendent in her brilliant white plumage. We expect Sonia to be naive and dazzled by the spectacle of flesh and elegance at Maxim’s, but we are in Reverse World. She’s the dazzler. She absorbs every detail, adjusts her name to Fifi, and takes the bid, as they say, of being mistaken for a little girl of the night by Danilo. (She’s unaware at this point of the plot to get them married, just as he’s unaware of her identity as Sonia, the target of his mission.) From this point on, Danilo is never in control of the situation. A reversal indeed! Danilo is bested on what he considers his home turf, the bordello where he is a king, not a guardsman. And note the twist on the unseen action, as Sonia and Danilo kick and pinch each other “under the frame,” until Danilo steals one of Sonia’s core fetishes, one of her shoes, sight unseen by the audience.
The scene leads to one of the great romantic moments in Lubitsch’s canon. Sonia flirts from Danilo’s table like an experienced soubrette. Here’s another knowing detail about comic fetishes that I really like from Lubitsch. Eyes are well known objects for the displacement of desire, as both gazing and being gazed at are deeply eroticizable experiences. One of the easiest ways to eroticize the gaze is to wink, to playfully hide the eye for an instant. We know Danilo gets it, as he arrives in Marshovia at the head of his guards like a Roman conqueror.
Perhaps surprisingly, Danilo himself doesn’t wink in the film. In fact, he’s usually wide-eyed — which makes sense, given his initial meeting with the veiled Sonia. Sonia is the last person we would associate with winking. After all, what is a wink under a veil? So it’s no surprise that the first time we see any part of her visage is as she is lifting her veil to get a good look at Danilo departing from her palace — it’s an anti-wink.
But at Maxim’s we’re in Reverse World, remember. So wink she does — at the “Turk” at the nearby table.
Disgusted with Sonia’s rejection of his mastery, Danilo draws Sonia/Fifi up to one of the private dining rooms by absconding with her shoe. Cinderella in reverse, she has to limp up the staircase to retrieve her magic shoe from the Count. There follows an excellent foot-and-shoe seduction scene that seems to presage the even more famous one in Sturges’s The Lady Eve. (That’s not the only connection. Sonia’s rapid, clever persona shifts resemble Jean/Eve’s in many ways. The influence of Lubitsch on Sturges was strong.) More dazzle — it’s good to remember sometimes that the old movie-house screens had silver flecks embedded in them — hence “silver screen” — which augmented the sparkling effects of a film’s lighting. Imagine seeing this on such a screen.
Danilo may have put an end to “Fifi’s” earlier flirtations, but Sonia’s control is much greater. Despite the lovely languor of the moment, she puts a halt to Danilo’s advances, invoking Napoleon’s error of “attacking too early,” thus besting both Danilo and Napoleon. A powerful wench indeed!
The scene isn’t over, though, only interrupted. Danilo return to Sonia and this time he is the one seduced, not by a comic fetish but by Sonia’s dance. In the famous “Merry Widow Waltz” scene Sonia “becomes-dance” instead of woman encumbered by comic objects. And once again, she controls the outcome.
And so it goes. Love grows. Politics obstructs it. Sonia is disillusioned. Noble Danilo is tried for treason in Marshovia and imprisoned in a most comfortable dungeon. Sonia visits, their love is reaffirmed, and they are married via a creaky prison dumbwaiter. The final comic fetish objects — the wedding rings — cap off the series of “rings” that began with Queen Dolores’s ankle bracelet and Marcelle’s garter at Maxim’s. Betrothal rings have a special magic in romance cultures that make them hard to puncture. Lubitsch does it by making them creaky.
Lubitsch’s Merry Widow is, for my taste, as close to perfect comic cinema as it gets.