CINEQUEST’s silent-film contingent is represented this year by a pair of films handpicked by the Stanford Theatre Foundation and playing in San Jose’s glorious California Theatre. If you’ve ever admired vintage beer paraphernalia at an antique store, you know the place Germany played in fantasies of the Prohibition-wracked 1920s, with towers, flowers and star-crossed love. The 1889 love-suicide of Crown Prince Rudolph, heir to the throne of Austria, Hungary and Bohemia, added immeasurably to this sort of romance. Directors as disparate as Max Ophuls and Terence Young tackled the so-called Mayerling Incident; it was treated indirectly in a thousand movies.
Once Groucho Marx baffled Thelma Todd—and young audiences in decades to come—in Horse Feathers by reciting a parody of just such Teutonic flourishes: “Come, Kapellmeister, let the violas throb; my regiment leaves at dawn.” Groucho (and scriptwriter S.J. Perelman) was going directly after The Merry Widow (which shows Feb. 26), MGM’s cinematic sachertorte of royal love amid political rot, a 1925 hit directed by Erich von Stroheim. (Groucho and his band of vandal brothers later stole more of the plot of The Merry Widow for Duck Soup.)
In The Merry Widow, John Gilbert as Prince Danilo of Monteblanco has an unsuitable romance with Mae Marsh’s Sally, an American commoner. The king forbids Danilo to see the girl. Thus she is forced into the arms of a perverted noble (Tully Marshall), whose money keeps this postage-stamp country afloat. Sally is too much for the plutocrat on his wedding night, so she’s immediately back on the market as a “merry widow.” Danilo’s attempt to reconnect with her in Paris is crossed by his evil cousin (lewd Roy D’Arcy). As an early critic named Iris Barry noted in 1926, von Stroheim may have been famous for decadence, but he always gave the villains a good solid punishment: this, despite his sinister Viennese persona and a reputation as the kind of profligate who made sure his extras wore embroidered underwear so that they would play their parts right down to the skin. Andrew Sarris later recorded von Stroheim’s own definition of the difference between himself and Ernst Lubitsch: “Lubitsch shows you first the king in his throne, than as he is in his bedroom. I show you first the king in his bedroom, so you’ll know just what he is when you see him on his throne.”
If Lubitsch had a longer career as a director, maybe it’s because of his get-along-to-go-along quality, later evinced in Lubitsch’s most famous disciple, Billy Wilder. Happily, Lubitsch also had the best talent for innuendo in pre-1950s Hollywood. The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (March 5), made in 1927, was, like The Merry Widow, an operetta first. It’s easy to see why this pretty tale about fleeting youth, lager, schlagers and flowering trees proved to be a perennial. Ramon Novarro and Norma Shearer are equally breathless as class-crossed lovers: a Germanic prince and the innkeeper’s daughter. Proposing that all true love is as much a meeting of bodies as a meeting of true minds, Lubitsch makes this a bittersweet story of love that can’t be restrained.
The two films, accompanied on the Wurlitzer by the one and only Dennis James, recall a parallel-universe cinematic Germany, not as a land of murderers in spiked helmets or twisted-cross armbands, but music-loving dreamy figures in beautiful toy-soldier uniforms, carrying beer steins big enough to bathe a toddler.
THE MERRY WIDOW plays Feb. 26 at 7pm; THE STUDENT PRINCE IN OLD HEIDELBERG plays March 5 at 7pm, both at the California Theatre. Tickets are $12.
