Wednesday, February 19 @ 7:30 PM / NEIU — The Auditorium at NEIU — 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
Tickets: $10 at the door
THE LOVE PARADE
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch • 1929
“If I’ve been happy. then you’re to blame / Oh, Paris, please, stay the same.” With this refrain in Maurice Chevalier’s introductory song in Ernst Lubitsch’s first musical, The Love Parade lays down a marker for its sophisticated emotional texture — rueful, melancholy, humbled, horny, and ultimately effervescent. The film proved an unlikely triumph and an act of chutzpah: adapted from a forgotten nonmusical play that had closed on Broadway after 32 performances over two decades prior, The Love Parade emerged as an original operetta with music and lyrics written expressly for the screen by Victor Schertzinger and Clifford Grey, produced at a time when Hollywood was still feeling out the talkies and taking its musical cues from bloated Broadway revues. Lubitsch had never made a sound film before, let alone a musical, and leading lady Jeanette MacDonald had never been in a movie at all. She stars as Queen Louise, the unmarried monarch of Sylvania, who has enough to do without fending off court gossip about potential suitors. Enter Count Alfred Renard (Chevalier, appropriately foxy), a Sylvanian attaché recently recalled from his embassy post in Paris for the crime of being too irresistible to too many local wives. Upon reading his personnel file, the queen swoons, but can she persuade the worldly lothario to settle for the ceremonial post of prince consort? Lubitsch and company make it all look so easy, as if inventing the screen musical were just another day at the office, an achievement so modest that they think nothing of bestowing a chorus to a pack of barking dogs. (KW)
109 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from UCLA Film & Television Archive, permission Universal
Preceded by: “Little Miss Everybody” (Murray Roth, 1929) – 8 min – 35mm from UCLA Film & Television Archive
NEXT UP: LIGHT OF DAY on Wednesday, February 26 at NEIU