Best movie of this year hands down!

Wonderful character development!

Good movie but grossly overrated

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Producer: Ernst Lubitsch. Copyright 3 August 1931 by Paramount Publix Corporation. Filmed at Paramount's Astoria Studio in New York. New York opening at the Criterion: 22 May 1931. U.S. release: 22 March 1931. 102 minutes. SYNOPSIS: Lieutenant winks at passing princess. Lieutenant is forced to marry princess.NOTES: Nominated for Hollywood's most prestigious annual award for Best Picture, but lost out to "Grand Hotel". Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times selected The Smiling Lieutenant as one of the "Ten Best Films of 1931". The film is a remake of "A Waltz Dream" (1925) directed for Ufa by Ludwig Berger, starring Mady Christians and Willy Fritsch, released in the USA by M-G-M. (Interestingly, Lubitsch was originally assigned to direct this movie, but left for America before shooting commenced).COMMENT: A trifle disappointing. Many of the situations recall The Love Parade (1929) in which Maurice Chevalier starred for producer/director Lubitsch opposite Jeanette MacDonald. Admittedly, Miss Colbert fills Jeanette's shoes most charmingly, while Miriam Hopkins is an absolute standout as the nasty princess. But this itself creates what I felt was a downbeat conclusion.Another problem for me lies in the unheralded disappearance of Charlie Ruggles. After a splendid introduction, he simply drops out of the action after five or ten minutes and doesn't come back! True, George Barbier makes an able substitute in the amiable buffoon department and provides many of the movie's best laughs. As for Chevalier, he plays with his usual gusto, though his unabashed breeziness in the face of some rather weak (or repetitive) material does become a little trying. The songs, despite their lilting score, fail to catch the ear. Not a single one of them do I remember just a few hours later! Admittedly, I'm being a bit hard on "The Smiling Lieutenant" because it didn't quite live up to my expectations. But even so, I'd still give it at least eight out of ten. Production values, as usual, are magnificent, and the celebrated "Lubitsch touch" is evident right from the very start.

Nowadays, could we even make a comedy this sexually-tinged without tipping into sheer raunchiness? What a lovely film! It took me several films before I finally appreciated Lubitsch and out of what I have seen, The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) has quickly surpassed the also excellent To Be or Not (1942) to Be as my favorite. It has a delightful cast, especially Claudette Colbert and Miriam Hopkins as the women who find themselves drawn to Maurice Chevalier's lusty lieutenant. The script is witty, sexy, and full of the joy of youth and sensual love. You feel giddy despite yourself while watching it. If the film has a flaw, then it's that some of the musical numbers are a touch forgettable, but Colbert's wonderful "Jazz Up Your Lingerie" more than makes up for that! And the appeal isn't limited to pre-code geeks like me. Even my dad, who generally sticks to post-1980s spy thrillers and avoids black and white movies like the plague, could not leave the living room until the movie was finished. He was laughing with, not at, this eighty plus year old film. That's how powerful the Lubitch magic is. Don't miss out!

In that era we rather misleadingly call "pre-code", infringements against the production code (which was fully in existence, just lacking in enforcement) came in all shapes and sizes. While some producers titillated their audiences with tentative nudity or shocked them with frank portrayals of infidelity and prostitution, others used delicate but potentially more flagrant transgressions of innuendo. It was at Paramount studios, in the pictures of Ernst Lubitsch, that innuendo was taken to astounding new heights of creative expressiveness.Of course, Lubitsch was and still is known for his tact in implying the unspoken, but he did not operate in a vacuum. The Smiling Lieutenant was his first collaboration with screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, and while Lubitsch was no doubt the driving personality behind his famous "touch", it seems Raphaelson (who would have a hand in most of the director's subsequent hits) thought enough along the same lines to make the pictures he wrote by far the most "touched". So while Lubitsch gives us visual clues such as the young lady using a secret knock to get into Maurice Chevalier's room, followed by a close-up of a light going on and off, it was probably Raphaelson who contributed some of that witty wordplay that adequately sets the tone. My favourite example of this has to be Chevalier's reply to Miriam Hopkins asking if married people winked; "Oh they do, but not at each other!" And then there are Clifford Grey's lyrics, which playfully delve into some of the more inventive innuendo, most memorably in "Breakfast Table Love".Chevalier is the perfect star for this kind of understated ribaldry. He has a "touch" of his own, in the way he smiles and raises his eyebrows, that curiously yet alluring treads the line between lecherous and charming. His appearance here, after the disappointing Monte Carlo with Jack Buchanan, demonstrates how important the right kind of actor is for such a role. If Jack Buchanan invited you to breakfast, you'd think he was making a polite offer to pop round in the morning for tea and toast. When Maurice Chevalier invites you to breakfast, there is absolutely no doubt that he wants you to spend the night, and frankly doesn't care what you fancy eating the next morning! Claudette Colbert makes a great screen partner for Chevalier. She is not quite the talented singer that Jeanette MacDonald is, but she has a slinkiness to her that suits the story's undertones, and would later be exploited by Cecil B. DeMille in Sign of the Cross and Cleopatra. This may be one of her earlier roles, but she shows a great confidence and maturity about her that is perfect for the part. The third corner of The Smiling Lieutenant's love triangle is Miriam Hopkins. Hopkins is sometimes mistaken for a bad actress. This is not the case. She is in fact an excellent ham, as were Charles Laughton and John Barrymore, by no means a subtle or realistic player, but nevertheless utterly captivating in the right role. She is excellent here as the naïve and frumpy young princess, displaying her finest comedic sensibilities.The Smiling Lieutenant contains only five songs, far fewer than previous Lubitsch musicals. With the exception of "Jazz Up Your Lingerie", the numbers also seem far less integral to the narrative than they were in Monte Carlo (which by the way is the best in terms of musical direction and integration, albeit the worst in every other respect). And yet this is a very consistently musical production. In 1931 it was still unusual for pictures to feature incidental music, and ironically the early talkies were often genuinely silent whenever the actors stopped talking. The Smiling Lieutenant however is scored almost from its first minute to its last. Contrary to the later practice of writing all music after filming wrapped, I suspect the incidental scoring may have been prepared beforehand and even played on the set. In particular Claudette Colbert's poignant abandonment of Chevalier seems almost choreographed to its sweeping string arrangement.When such backing scores became commonplace, they sometimes actually spoiled a picture's integrity, blaring out emotional cues for each scene when none was required. But for The Smiling Lieutenant it is a positive bonus, providing a light and lyrical setting for the many wordless moments. And this of course is all the better for those neatly constructed vignettes of unspoken innuendo, sly winks at the audience that are so fabulously clever they are a delight in themselves.

Before I saw this film I read all the reviews on this site. And then I saw the movie...and I was wondering what all those other reviewers had been taking... The film lasts about 85 minutes, and that's too long by half. I always hated Chevalier's awful accent (half the time you're straining to try and make sense of what he's saying), but as a rule his lighthearted acting makes it bearable. Not here. Hopkins as the princess and Barbier as the king are worse than caricatures and there are some very xenophobic remarks here and there. But the worst is...Claudette's performance. I love, no I adore Claudette Colbert. She's by far my favourite actress of the first half of the 20th century (Michelle Pfeiffer took her crown in the latter part). But what she's showing us here, is shameful. She's overacting as if she's in a (talking) movie for the first time. For example when she's leaving Chevalier's apartment, and she's leaving the key. Her facial expressions are way too pathetic and remind me of the silent movies, when everything had to be over the top to convey the meaning. This is a movie to see once, then quickly forget about. 2 stars out of 10.