#6 in my ranking of Ernst Lubitsch’s filmography.
After the stumble that was Monte Carlo, Ernst Lubitsch comes roaring back with The Smiling Lieutenant, a delightful look at a Viennese love triangle that crosses class boundaries, ending with a surprisingly moral take on the pair of relationships at the film’s core. It’s about two people forced into a situation through coincidence and some light farce, learning to bridge the gap between them to find mutual attraction and, perhaps, even love. Like the rest of Lubitsch’s best work, and even some of his lesser work, his endings elevate so much of what came before, and The Smiling Lieutenant is no different.
The titular lieutenant is Niki (Maurice Chevalier), an Austrian military officer who opens the film with a song about how there’s not fighting and the only campaigning he does is one of love with women. His friend brings his attention to a traveling violinist, Franzi (Claudette Colbert) whom Niki quickly falls for and seduces during an exchange about how he wants their next meeting to be breakfast but Franzi wants it to be, at the earliest, afternoon tea. The next scene is a song about the wonders of breakfast as they eat it. It’s really a delightful exchange (this probably didn’t survive the Hays Office when it was submitted a few years after the film’s original release).
The title of the film comes from the intersection of Lieutenant Niki and the state visit from the king and princess of the neighboring, invented country Flausenthurm (make sure to spell it with that “h” or they’ll be offended). It’s a visit of cousins, King Adolf XV (George Barbier) being a cousin to the Emperor Franz Josef (Cornelius MacSunday), while also being Princess Anna’s (Miriam Hopkins) first visit to any place outside her own country. It doesn’t start well when Franz Josef does not meet them at the station, preferring to attend an event about cattle, and it’s made all the worse when one of the color guard along the road, a certain Lieutenant Niki, smiles as the carriage passes in a way that looks like he was laughing at the Princess Anna. He was, of course, doing no such thing. He was simply exchanging smiles with his girl, Franzi, across the road. However, it becomes an incident that requires satisfaction, leading to Niki visiting the king and his daughter to offer an explanation. Saying that he was smiling at his girl across the way would be unbecoming of an officer, so when the king offers him an out by suggesting that Niki was overcome with the looks of Princess Anna, he takes it, thinking it a harmless exit from his situation.
It turns into so much more for the sheltered Princess Anna as she falls madly in love with the tall, handsome, and charming Viennese officer (complete with outrageous French accent). King Adolf pulls some strings and gets Niki assigned to them as an attaché, keeping him close to Anna. Splitting his days with Anna and his nights with Franzi, Niki feels like the situation is in control. There’s a rather delightful musical number that interchanges between Niki and Franzi singing about their love together while Anna sings with her attendants about her love for Niki. It all comes crashing down, though, when Anna convinces her father to convince the emperor to arrange the marriage, coming as a complete surprise to Niki.
Niki goes through with the wedding, but he will do no more than share in the façade of the marriage. He refuses to sleep with Anna, going to his own room in the Flausenthurm palace, and when Franzi’s musical group comes to the country, he sneaks out of the palace to meet with her, abusing what little official power he has to arrange the meetings through a police officer. These illicit meetings gain the attention of Anna, and the film becomes that exact right kind of drama that Lubitsch inserts into his comedies to give them a surprising amount of emotional weight.
Anna loves Niki. She really does, and she cannot figure out how to make him love her back. She’s accomplished with a piano, so she must have the same musical tendencies that he obviously finds so attractive in Franzi, right? She’s a pretty girl, so she must excite him in similar ways, right? Well, she fixes it all when she brings Franzi to the palace, and we see that Franzi is the most even-headed character in the film. Her love has been married. It may not have been entirely his choice, but that’s the situation. She meets his wife, and Anna is a good person who’s just a little lost in her sense of unrequited romance. So, what does Franzi do? She teaches Anna how to attract Niki.
This is why I love Lubitsch. Well, one reason I love Lubitsch. His films are generally delights with wonderful senses of humor, but he never loses sight of the human and the humanist. He never lets go of a certain sense of duty for his characters. The movie is ultimately about Niki and Anna finding how to love one another. That does fall mostly on Anna since she loves Niki from the start while he’s forced into the marriage with her, but instead of running to her papa to fix her problems like she did earlier, she gets female advice and implements it herself. She becomes the kind of woman that Niki would love, all while it’s played out in one of those little sequences that perfectly encapsulate the Lubitsch Touch. It’s just a bit with Niki wanting to rip through everything and make love while Anna keeps a checkers board between them. She’s not just a plaything for him. She’s going to play with him in her own way, too. And what’s the solution? It’s not putting the board on the couch or the floor, it’s throwing the board onto the bed.
Really, I love how Lubitsch made films. I find them, early, intoxicatingly delightful while, later, he puts in the solid dramatic work to make them something more than just bits of frilly fluff. He gives his characters weight and agency until they come to their conclusions, their earned and amusing conclusions.
Chevalier himself is just one charming performer, using his entire body, in particular every muscle on his face, as well as his outrageous accent to sell himself as the great lover of women, and it just works. Colbert is delightful as the lower class woman who understands the situation better than anyone else involved, loving her moment in the sun that is Niki’s love but also knowing what she needs to do if she truly loves him. Hopkins gets special mention, though, as her journey requires the most of her out of the other characters. She’s an innocent ingénue who doesn’t understand the world around her, caught up in an affectation with a handsome man, and by the end she’s a confidently sexual woman who knows how to get what she wants herself. She really is a delight in the middle of a host of delights.
The Smiling Lieutenant is one of those movies where it seems like the public consciousness really begins for an artist (Stagecoach by John Ford was another), and while there are real delights before it, I see the appeal of starting here. This is Lubitsch as the world knows him, and it is wonderful.
Rating: 4/4
David Vining, Author 
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