BB.5
(out of 5)
No expense was spared for this lavish, early Technicolour musical starring MGM’s stellar sweethearts Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald (studio boss Louis B. Mayer’s favourite actress). Victor Herbert’s celebrated operetta becomes a play within the play in Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell’s screenplay as married couple Eddy and Macdonald celebrate their sixth year performing the show night after night. The routine they’ve gotten into, with the show and their family, has become so constricting that the offers coming from the west coast to star in musical movies are starting to gain more and more appeal. The various bits of dialogue concerning the need to avoid the cultural wasteland of California and stay in thriving New York City have Parker’s stamp all over them in this otherwise lifeless and stilted production. Eddy and Macdonald never really had much chemistry except as the perfect vanilla couple for audiences with no imagination (or someone like Mayer, who saw them as the cure for his own ethnic shame). The photography, which won a special Academy Award for colour, is stunning throughout, and the film has been kept in pristine condition since then.
USA, 1938
Directed by W.S. Van Dyke
Screenplay by Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, based on the musical book by Fred De Gresac, Harry B. Smith, Robert B. Smith
Cinematography by Allen M. Davey, Oliver T. Marsh
Produced by Hunt Stromberg
Music by Fred De Gresac, Harry B. Smith, Robert B. Smith, Herbert Stothart
Production Design by Cedric Gibbons
Costume Design by Adrian
Film Editing by Robert Kern
