Among the neglected gems of Hollywood comedies of the Interwar period, Spring Parade has to be among the most neglected, and the gemmiest. Even though it is one of Deanna Durban’s best films, it is accessible only in a badly deteriorated print (the consequence of a long copyright dispute). As a result, the available versions are all visually terrible, even though its cinematographer, Universal’s ace Joseph Valentine, was nominated for an Oscar. Yet another wonderful film that should be urgently restored. (It can be seen on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=pT32OjDYX5Q.)
Spring Parade is a remake of the German-language original, Frühjahrsparade, made in 1934 at Universal’s Vienna studio. That film, produced by Joe Pasternak, who would later become the chief producer at Universal in Hollywood, was scripted by Ernst Marischka, who was, along with his brother Hubert, one of the giants of the operetta world in interwar Vienna. (Marischka’s greatest film successes were in the 1950s, as the writer-director the “Sissi” films devoted to the beloved Empress Elizabeth of Austria and Queen of Hungary. ) I haven’t been able to find a print of the original Frühjahrsparade. What I have been able to piece together is that, like many of Pasternak’s Vienna productions, it was truly an “Austro-Hungarian” project. While most of the cast and crew were Austrian, the director, Géza von Bolváry was a celebrated Hungarian director of mainly German-language musicals; the female lead was Franciska Gaal, one of Hungarian cinema’s young superstars at the time; and the camerawork was by István Eiben, a giant of early Hungarian cinema. Many other members of the crew were Hungarian, also. (Budapest’s dominant language for much of the late 1890s and early 1900s was German, so the Hungarian film artists often worked on Austrian and German films.) All this is relevant for a number of reasons; the main one being that Spring Parade is an attempt by a cohort from Pasternak’s Vienna/Budapest studios to remake a film they clearly adored, six years later, as refugees in Hollywood.
Spring Parade is the most “Austro-Hungarian” film — indeed, Hungarian, period — Hollywood ever produced. Start with the story. Ilonka (Durban), a feisty peasant girl from the Transylvanian village of Szilágysomlyó (a real place, now in Romania) heads to market to sell a goat. There she grudgingly buys a fortune-card from a carnival fortune teller and his crow. The fortune predicts that she will marry and find happiness in Vienna with an artist, and she will gain the help of a powerful man. She then encounters Gustav (Mischa Auer), an arrogant would-be buyer for her goat, who hails from a neighboring village. Their country-market haggling and flyting lead to a hilarious csárdás duel, which Ilonka wins — or rather, survives. Disoriented and exhausted, she falls asleep in a haystack. She wakes up to find that the haystack is actually the moving cart of Ladislav Teschek (S.Z. Sakall), a baker on his way back home to Vienna. At first horrified that she’s now more than fifty miles her village, Ilonka remembers the prophecy and relaxes. She enters Vienna singing along to the festival of waltzing that apparently never ends in that city. Teschek gives her a job in his bakery, where she meets a dashing young soldier, Harry Marten (Robert Cummings), who, it turns out, is a budding composer. Establishing that a composer is an artist (it’s Vienna, after all), Ilonka is now convinced that her destiny is assured. Meanwhile, one of Teschek’s main sources of income is in supplying salt pastries for the breakfast table of Emperor Franz-Joseph (Henry Stephenson). Ilonka secrets a letter in the pastries, asking the Emperor to support her “genius” composer. Teschek gets in trouble for messing with the Emperor’s breakfast, requiring Ilonka to see the benevolent, grandfatherly Emperor herself to set the record straight. All things end not only well, but as they should: the Cinderella country mouse Ilonka is invited to the Imperial Ball, where she is recognized and honored by Franz-Joseph himself, who also elevates Teschek into court baker; Harry conducts the imperial orchestra; Ilonka sings; and the elegant guests waltz into the night.
The costumes and many details are unusually authentic for the time, place, and genre. The musical score, for which Charles Previn received an Oscar nomination, is rigorously true to the spirit of the soundtracks of Austrian and Hungarian films of the early ’30s. The film is unusually strict in depicting the objects in this fantastically nostalgic world accurately. And there’s an especially striking “Hungarianness” behind the scenes of this latter-day Wiener film. Spring Parade has perhaps the most Hungarian associations of any film made in Hollywood. One has to begin with its producer, Joe Pasternak, who, as it happens, was born in the real Szilágysomlyó, and setting it as Ilonka’s home village is obviously an homage to him. Director Henry Koster, although not Hungarian by birth or upbringing, did much of his best pre-Hollywood European work at Pasternak’s Budapest studio, migrating there with the producer, always one step ahead of the Nazis, from Berlin to Vienna to Budapest, and ultimately to the U.S. Sakall was a famous Hungarian actor in Central Europe; known mainly for supporting roles in the States, he was sometimes the marquee lead in Hungarian Interwar films. While Mischa Auer was Russian by birth, he was adopted and raised from abject poverty by his maternal grandfather, the virtuoso Hungarian violinist Leopold Auer. These connections would not be sufficient by themselves. What makes Spring Parade so Hungarian is that it is a bona fide homage to Hungarian filmmaking and filmmakers of the early ’30s.
Of course, Deanna Durbin seems like an outlier in this group. But since this is one of her best and most carefully researched performances, that’s worth a second look. Durbin, who had aspired to be an opera singer rather than a screen actress, was famously nurtured as an actress by Koster. During much of her early career, she was embedded in the community of Central European emigre film artists that Koster supported. Perhaps significantly, Durban later married the film’s co-script writer/adaptor, Felix Jackson, who was also part of Koster’s and Pasternak’s Universal circle in Vienna and Budapest, and who scripted several of Durban’s films. Although she was one of the most popular — and highest paid — North American screen actresses in the 1940s, Durban left the States and settled in France, a move to Europe she never regretted. She considered Spring Parade to be her favorite film, and many of her collaborators were apparently awed and amused at how hard she worked to pronounce Hungarian words and learn the csárdás. (Her pronunciation of “Szilágysomlyó,” not the most common word in Hungarian, is impeccable; so is Mischa Auer’s.) Such Hungarian authenticity was rare in Hollywood’s many adaptations of what Lubitsch called “Hungarian plays.” (Wyler’s The Good Fairy and Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner are the other prominent exceptions.)
Spring Parade is a white raven. Given the historical context, it’s a puzzle that the film was ever made. It no doubt was enthusiastically supported by Pasternak from the get-go, and Durbin’s presence guaranteed it would be a success. (It was one of her highest-grossing films.) But the time for frou-frou Hapsburg waltzing operettas was long past. It’s 1940, not 1934. The whole world knew that the New Vienna was a provincial capital of the Nazi Reich. (It’s interesting that MGM released its own sentimental Old Austria romance, Florian, that same year.) The film’s creative community was in exile in Southern California, not contentedly sipping ‘pressos in Budapest coffee houses. Moreover, most of the principals — Pasternak, Koster, Sakall, Auer, Felix Jackson — were Central European Jews, who by that time were intimately aware of the war in Europe and had fled Nazi persecutions. I don’t know what inspired Pasternak and company to remake Frühjahrsparade. I speculate it was a matter of deep nostalgia for the kinds of films they were able to make in a world that they surely knew was being annihilated. Only in America.
There are many Lubitschean moments in Spring Parade, especially the Lubitsch of the Berlin years, when Koster (then known by his given name, Kosterlitz) was learning the trade of writer-director. But unlike in Lubitsch, Spring Parade‘s gaiety has no wry double-entendres or sly wit. It’s proudly innocent and sincere. Its gaiety is full of what Germans call Freudigkeit, and Hungarians derű: serene and confident cheer. There are no villains, no Malvolios, just a few harmless buffoons.
The film makes its attitude clear from the beginning, as Ilonka drags her unwilling goat to market, while singing a wonderful Gus Kahn adaptation of the Robert Stolz- Ernst Marischka tune, “Ich freu mich, wenn die Sonne lacht” from Frühjahrsparade, now retitled and repurposed as “It’s Foolish But It’s Fun.” It’s Spring Parade‘s anthem and the film-makers’ testament. (It will be hilariously revised by Teschek’s impish boy apprentices later in the film.)
I love to climb an apple tree
Though apples green are bad for me
And I’ll be sick as I can be
It’s foolish but it’s fun
While wise men seek your time and space
And get all wrinkled in the face
From loafing in some shady place
It’s foolish but it’s fun
If it should ever come to pass
That I inherit wealth
I’ll eat and drink and drink and eat
Until I wreck my health
I love to ramble over lea
And chase the busy bumble bee
Though the bee may light on me
It’s foolish but it’s fun
When thunder storms put folks to rout
And no one dares to venture out
That’s when I love to slosh about
It’s foolish but it’s fun
I like to be on friendly terms
With pollywogs and mangle worms
And all the very deadly germs
It’s foolish but it’s fun
I love to sit beside a brook
And wait for fish to bite
And though they never do
It’s nice to think perhaps they might
While others climb the mountains high
Beneath the tree I love to lie
And watch the snails go whizzing by
It’s foolish but it’s fun
I want to sing, I want to waltz
My heart is doing somersaults
I love this world with all its faults
It’s foolish but it’s fun
I want to walk a garden wall
Especially a wall that’s tall
And if I fall, I fall that’s all
It’s foolish but it’s fun
I want to climb a steeple
And I want to ring a bell
So I can tell the people
That I like them all so well
The grass is green, the sky is blue
The cows go moo, the cuckoos coo
I want to be a cuckoo too
It’s cuckoo but it’s fun
At the market, Ilonka tries to haggle with the fortune-teller and his crow. The fortune turns out to be too implausible; she wants her money back. How can a Transylvanian peasant find love in Vienna? Her protests are interrupted when she spots a potential buyer for her goat — Gustav.
For me, the scenes with Ilonka and Gustav are the film’s high points. They’re in English, but it’s hard to imagine a comic dialogue and situation less American — bargaining at a village market, trading insults about their respective villages’ dancing skills, the distinctive rustic erotic banter that’s barely distinguishable from a provocation to a fight, and challenging each other to a dance contest to defend their villages’ honor. Durbin and Auer are pitch perfect. I can almost hear them saying their lines in a Transylvanian rural dialect. Like I said, a white raven in Hollywood.
There’s nothing I don’t love about the csárdás duel.
Luck — or is it destiny? — intervenes, and while Ilonka sleeps on what she thinks is a haystack, she is conveyed to Vienna by an unwitting, but not unwilling, fairy godfather, Teschek the Baker. As Ilonka approaches her fortune’s destination, the village comedy turns magical. (So does the geography. Teschek estimates that they are 58 miles from Szilágysomlyó and have nearly arrived in Vienna. In the real world, the distance between the village and the capital is closer to 500 miles.)
As Teschek drives her into Wiener heaven, Ilonka observes the beautiful, ever-happy denizens in their beer gardens and elegant balls dancing to Strauss, and she can’t help but spontaneously join in and lead the choir with her “Blue Danube Dream.”
Teschek offers her a room and a job in his bakery. In an echt East/Central European scene, Ilonka begins her transformation from peasant to city-girl by removing layer after layer of petticoats, a comic “folk striptease” that resonates with an entire half-continent of village life east of Berlin, provoking the urbane servant girl Jennie (Anne Gwynne) to ask, “say, what are you doing? Undressing or shedding?” Some commentators call this a Lubitschean joke — which I agree it is, but it’s also incredibly on-point for an Austro-Hungarian interwar comic romance. I assume the idea came directly from the original Austrian film, but the way Durban performs it is dazzlingly funny. She sheds her layers of petticoats that keep her — in a Viennese + Lubitschean universe — from being available to her (as yet unidentified) love. She is “shedding” her past as a yokel and tomboy, a metamorphosis that won’t be complete until she is embraced by the Emperor’s court.
But before that, baby steps. Between village and court, csárdás and waltz, Ilonka has to gain merit among the burghers by working in Teschek’s bakery. The simplicity and directness of Transylvania gives way to the complexity and ironies of the city, and the comic population increases suddenly. Teschek’s bakery is a special space, frequented by bourgeois ladies, dashing young soldiers, prissy aristocrats, and imperial servants. Ilonka, still “green” even though she’s left her goat behind, is swept up in an little spontaneous intrigue. Dashing young corporal and aspiring composer Harry enters to flirt with receptive Jenny. Soon after enters Count Zorndorf (Allyn Joslyn), Jenny’s smug, would-be aristocratic sugar daddy. To avoid several kinds of embarrassment, Harry pretends that he came to the bakery to pay court to Ilonka, whom he sees for the first time. But she has seen him, and liked what she saw.
Using the oldest device in the book, the script brings Harry and Ilonka together through a misdirected note. Harry hires the apprentices to deliver a rendezvous request to Jenny, but the boys hand it to Ilonka. (Harry’s instructions were fated to be misdirected.) Ilonka decides she’ll go, if only to tell “her corporal” that she can’t marry a soldier because her foretold mate has to be an artist. In a great extended scene, the longest set-piece in the film, Ilonka appears at the appointed Biergarten, transformed into a Viennese beauty (Durbin at her most radiant, and Joe Valentine at his peak). It takes a while for the flummoxed corporal to understand the misunderstanding — and he is of course too gallant, as a soldier and an “excellency,” to inform the shopgirl of the mistake. I love this scene. Physically, Ilonka is a gorgeous, elegantly dressed, coiffed, and behatted beauty. But you can’t change a Hungarian peasant girl just by dressing her up. Outraged at the price of asparagus charged by the restaurant, she creates a small scene. She knows a thing or two about asparagus — she’s grown it, cooked it, and sold it herself; though she’s never, as the waiter (the great Walter Catlett) notes, bought it. Strong in her rock-hard village-materialistic morality, Ilonka insists on haggling even in an elegant restaurant.
The scene follows an earlier one in the bakery shop, where she accuses the Emperor’s man who has come to pick up the salt pastries for the Emperor’s table of leaving without paying. She has no concept of credit. She has no concept of indirection, period. I think this first part of the Biergarten scene has affinities with a more famous encounter of a cultural naif with a city restaurant, Nina’s lunch with Leon in Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, which was released a year earlier. I’m pretty sure that Spring Parade‘s running joke of the stubborn, earthy, honest, confident peasant girl in the Big City was a perennial comic theme in Viennese and Budapest operettas, but Koster’s Hollywood version seems as fresh as Lubitsch’s more original twist on it. Ilonka’s stubbornness could easily have been abrasive and childish, but Koster absorbs it into Durbin’s radiance and impeccably modulated sweet voice. Ilonka eventually understands that she can’t behave in the capital as one does in Szilágysomlyó, but like all of Durbin’s heroines, there’s no way she’s giving up.
On the contrary, she breaks into song. And then discovers that Harry composes waltzes — he’s an artist, after all.
And as in any Deanna Durbin story, she takes charge. She stops the orchestra and the dance to make time for Harry to deliver his napkin-inscribed score for the waltz that he has been prevented from finishing until Ilonka creates the space for him. The waltz (which meant something different in the Vienna of 1934 when the original film was made than in Hollywood of 1940) captivates everyone, and the company enters the dance with extra dopamine. The whole scene is a wonder. There’s an extra poignancy, knowing that it is a lovely, artful, and completely sincere homage to a sensibility — foolish, but extraordinarily fun — that only the most desperate hope could believe would survive. I’m glad it made money, but I can’t believe that that was its main motive.
Later, the mellow old Emperor discovers an attractive mystery in his breakfast pastries. Someone in Teschek’s shop has sent him messages asking him to support the genius waltzing corporal. This must be followed up. (Hathaway’s depiction of Franz-Joseph is a pip.)
Intermezzo: the apprentice imps’ version of “It’s Foolish But It’s Fun.”
Complications proliferate. The Emperor’s officers charged with investigating Ilonka’s note and Harry’s score baked into the salt pastries assume that Teschek was attempting to poison him; they arrest him and close his shop. Ilonka resolves to see the Emperor to set him straight and save the baker. But how can the hayseed shopgirl get a royal audience? Jenny has an idea. She’ll seek the mediation of a certain Mr. Wiedlemeier, the chamberlain of the court, who as a bonus can instruct Ilonka in the proper courtly protocols. The apprentices hear about this arrangement and mangle their information, telling Harry (for a price) that Ilonka is seeing another man that evening, said Wiedlemeier. Weidlemeier turns out to be Franklin Pangborn, playing a new angle on his effeminate archetype. As he pedantically instructs Ilonka on correct behavior, preparing her for her elevation, Harry appears in a jealous rage, and promptly debases himself with an easy admirer of his from the past. Everything is collapsing around our heroine. Teschek arrested, Harry a jerk. A couple of dangerous misunderstandings. Time for Deanna/Ilonka to take matters into her own hands. (Koster gives Ilonka’s hands a lovely, poetic role in the film. The spit-in-one’s-palm handshakes that seal deals in the village, signs of straightforward, earthy honor, are baselines. She has to hold herself back from that handshake in the Biergarten, though the proprietor seems inclined to take it. She slaps Harry with them twice, peasant style: hard. And in the end, Franz-Joseph himself insists on the “mountain handshake.”)
And so Jenny persuades her Count to persuade Wiedlemeier, and Ilonka secures an invitation to meet the Emperor. It’s a great scene, with great chemistry between Durbin and Stephenson. Its idealized image of the benevolent emperor is pure “Old Austria” — and the mountain handshake between Franz-Joseph and a Hungarian peasant girl is a nostalgic trace of a scene that would have had hefty political symbolism, if it had appeared in an operetta a generation earlier: the “alliance” of the benevolent, wise, gallant Austria with the earthy, pastoral, headstrong — and feminine! — Hungary in the Dual Monarchy. Those days were so long past that they lived only in the conventions of borderline kitsch musicals.
The threads are raveled up at the Imperial Ball, Ilonka sings Harry’s song, and the whole court joins in one big Wiener walzer.
Spring Parade is far and away my favorite of Durbin’s and Koster’s films. It bears comparison with Lubitsch’s earlier comedies, especially The Merry Widow, but it’s much sweeter, without being the least bit cloying. Maybe even more than in Lubitsch, Koster’s mis-en-scene and the Jackson-Manning script carefully design even the smallest details to resonate with each other. It’s basically a more poetic and romantic film than Lubitsch was inclined to make. Its nostalgia brings it close to kitsch, but I think it’s too sincere to be considered that. Even with the woeful prints that are available, you can tell it was a visual feast. Durbin never looked more beautiful, and her acting more natural. I haven’t seen all of Koster’s films, but I’d wager Spring Parade is his masterpiece. There are lots of films on this blog that I wish would get restored. Spring Parade is at the top of my list.