The Love Parade

#7 in my ranking of Ernst Lubitsch’s filmography.

That’s it. I get it. I am 100% on board with this Ernst Lubitsch guy. I’d enjoyed a fair number of his films up to now, especially after he made the transition to Hollywood, and I’d even loved a couple of them. However this, his first full sound film, shows me everything about his popularity both with audiences at the time but also, in particular, with the artists and executives that were his contemporaries and the following generation. Absolutely delightful from beginning to end while demonstrating a shocking amount of command over the earliest of sound processes, The Love Parade, written by Guy Bolton based on a novel by Leon Xanrof and Jules Chancel, is the exact kind of urbane, witty, romance through a fake little European country that is filled with double entendres and never less than amusing at any point in its run time.

The Sylvanian ambassador to France is Count Alfred Renard (Maurice Chevalier), a suave and handsome ladies’ man. A minister from Sylvania follows him for a week, documenting his torrid exploits, and convinces the queen to recall him to the capitol. The queen is Louise (Jeanette MacDonald), a saucy, young woman who has illicit dreams that she refuses to share with her ladies in waiting while rejecting every offered hand in marriage brought to her by her cabinet. Into this situation walks the exciting, young military officer Renard, and they’re both smitten with each other for different reasons. He is an exciting, romantic, and handsome young man who could be elevated to a station where she could marry him, and she could be his greatest conquest. Very little of this is said explicitly, but that’s part of the appeal of the Lubitsch Touch.

The idea is that Lubitsch is dealing directly with sex but even before the imposition of the Hays Code, he was couching the whole affair in light banter and double entendre, masking it, and giving it an urbane air that elevated above simple sex comedies. The most potent form of this, probably the moment in the film I had the dumbest of my collection of dumb grins on my face, was during the first dinner between Renard and Louise, during the number “My Love Parade” where Renard compares Louise to all of his conquests. It’s all about Renard bragging about his love life while Louise falls madly for him for it. It’s also a delight as a song with lyrics that rhyme amusingly all while Chevalier gives a wonderfully physical performance to the whole thing.

The dramatic heart of the film is the reversal of gender roles where the woman, Louise, becomes the dominant in the relationship, providing for the man and doing all of the work, while the man sits around and tries to find ways to fill his days while his wife takes on the very public duties of her office. He’s emasculated as the trophy husband with no rights or duties. He’s taken as Prince Consort, not King, so all he can do is where the clothes that Louise buys for him. When Louise treats him as little more than an ornament, offering him new clothes as a way to make up for his feelings of insignificance.

It was kind of predictable that someone like Renard would chaff under such control and limited freedom. He thrilled at making his conquests in Paris, and now he’s stuck in a palace. He does have a pretty wife, and there are implications that their love life is vigorous, but he desires his freedom. It all comes to a head when he presents a plan for Sylvania to deal with its financial troubles from its own resources instead of relying on a loan from Wall Street that could be undone through a series of diplomatic rumors (amusingly laid out) that would start if and when people see the queen and her prince consort not happy together.

Renard decides that with the current financial situation, he actually has the upper hand, and he gleefully deploys it. There’s his appearance at an opera where the couple must put on a good face, and he rubs Louise’s face in the situation by making her beg him to stay. He also informs her of his intention to divorce and return to Paris.

The resolution of the film involves the reversal of the reversal, including revisiting some key exchanges from earlier with a different light. The first half of the film is more purely comedic in tone while the second half digs more deeply into the dramatics of the piece, but it’s the final moments that marry the two tones perfectly, using the dramatic turns of the later half along with callbacks to the lighter moments of the first that fit appropriately. It’s really a delight to behold.

The supporting cast is also a wonderful source of comedic relief as well. Headed by Jacques (Lupino lane), Renard’s servant who follows him from Paris and becomes involved with the maid servant Lulu (Lillian Roth), there’s a wonderful mirror to the upper crust action at play. It’s evident from the opening musical number where Renard sings to Paris about how much he’ll miss it and its women, which Jacques gets a refrain to repeat, and then Renard’s dog also gets to do it as well, howling at all the female dogs he will miss. There’s also a number later where Jacques and Lulu sing of their happiness in their common romance (“Let’s Be Common”), and it devolves into physical comedy as they kick each other with Jacques eventually getting thrown out of a window.

The most fascinating moment in film history to me is the transition from silent to sound films, so when I take up the filmographies of directors who made that transition themselves, I always have a special eye out for the first sound film. And, you know what? This is an amazing technical achievement. It’s obvious some of it was post-dubbed, but the vast majority of the spoken and sung stuff was captured live on set. There’s cross-singing and dancing, all of which had to be captured on a single audio track without mixing, and the sound is surprisingly tight. Lubitsch didn’t let the imposition of sound slow him down. He pushed as hard against the restrictions as he could, making a movie as visually alive as his silent films, using every tool at his disposal to make it work. This is M levels of accomplishment in the early use of sound, and Lubitsch did it two years earlier than Fritz Lang did.

The Love Parade is an absolute delight of a film that both amuses and moves at the same time. It’s an early triumph of the medium of sound film, and it shows that Lubitsch was more than just a witty filmmaker. He was a technically accomplished one as well.

Rating: 4/4