Has it really been since April 5 since I've posted an entry? Shame on me. But between work, teaching and a lingering illness from which I am improving each week (I can't divulge all of my secrets, can I?), the blog got away from me.But not movies. While I've been at home recovering, I've watched tons of old movies and have a stack of notes on my desk. So, let's brighten up this dry spell with the above marquee announcement of my return (OK, I'm stretching) with the delightful "The Smiling Lieutenant," a 1931 musical from director Ernst Lubitsch starring Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert and Miriam Hopkins. 
While "Lieutenant" isn't quite as good as "The Merry Widow," the 1934 Lubitsch-Chevalier-MacDonald MGM film that I blogged about last summer, this is a charmer. Chevalier plays the title character, Niki, a lieutenant with an eye for the ladies. He falls in love with Franzi (Colbert, above), a violinist in an all-female band. However, while on duty, Niki flirts with Franzi, and Princess Anna (Hopkins), a dowdy visiting dignitary, misinterprets his flirting as a joke. In order to save his life, Niki lies to her father, the King of Flausenthurm, that he finds his daughter delightful. Anna expects nothing less than marriage, so the king arranges for Niki to marry her. This breaks his heart and Franzi's. However, their affair doesn't end, which causes the princess to wonder why her dashing husband doesn't care! about her.Lubitsch brings his usual style and lightness to th! e materi al, emphasizing the quick wit and sexual interplay. In fact, despite the creation of the Production Code, it wasn't fully enforced yet (that would come in 1934), because the studios knew what sold tickets. So, there are some racy scenes in this movie. It's clear that the unmarried Niki and Franzi live together. At one point, when she realizes that Niki must leave her to marry the princess, Franzi sneaks into his apartment to pick up her things, including a negligee. And, one of the best songs comes toward the end. When Anna confronts Franzi about her ongoing affair with Niki, Franzi responds by criticizing Anna's drab wardrobe. Then together they sing "Jazz Up Your Lingerie"!Chevalier, still under contract to Paramount, brings his usual charms to this film. At this point in his career, I don't think Chevalier cared about doing much else than a variation on his music hall persona. And, frankly, when it's done this well, why should we care? It's fun to see that same persona on! display nearly 30 years later in "Gigi."
Colbert is great fun, but the one that surprised me was Hopkins (above). This was one of her first films and it shot her to the top ranks at Paramount. I've always found her style monotonous. However, this film -- combined with strong work in "The Heiress," which I reviewed last year -- gave me a new appreciation for her. She is headstrong and funny -- very funny. She mines the humor in the script for what it's worth.What I really admire about "The Smiling Lieutenant" is how well it's held up with the passage of time. I find many early sound films to be static -- either they lack movement or are too talky. Lubitsch moves us through the story with ease, and it feels ligh! t and fun. It's also of note that the three stars filmed a Fre! nch lang uage version of this film. In the early years of sound before dubbing or subtitles took place, the studios would make foreign-language versions of their films."The Smiling Lieutenant" received one Oscar nomination, and it was for Best Picture, and in retrospect nicely deserved. It's a winner and an early sound film worth seeing. Trust me, it will make you smile.
Great classic films, best all time movies
Social media has taken over the internet in the past year or two, and one of the cool things about it is movie-makers being able to connect directly to fans during the movie making process. Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich has been keeping fans up to date on the progress of the film through 
Though the announcement of the Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Archive Collection was met by equal excitement and derision by fans and those critical of the manufactured on demand aspects of the line, the move to bring the Studio's impressive, if actually unwieldy, library of titles, has proven to be a big hit with collectors. 
One of the best ways the line has been utilized is with large groupings of legendary, but rarely seen, theatrical short subjects, with WB Archive multi-disc sets pulling together a host of collections featuring high-profile names long-forgotten by the majority of all but the die-hard nostalgic collectors. As one of those kinds of people, I'm lapping it all up, and especially enjoy the mix of kitschy titles that I grew up on (Captain Sindbad, Captain Nemo And The Underwater City, Doc Savage), early cinema revues (the wonderful Hollywood Revue Of 1929) and full libraries of short films that I've only been able to tantalisingly glimpse as one-off bonus features on mainstream discs. 
Believe It Or Not!, featuring the celebrated discoverer of strange things, Robert L Ripley, is a collection of short subjects that fall somewhere as a cross between the newsreels of the day and those odd, curious travelogue tours of far off lands and the people that reside there. Ripley had started as a newspaper cartoonist, detailing a 1922 trip around the globe in his strips, taking in some of the unknown customs that other countries practised, as well as drawing attention to the many weird and wonderful people and places he came across. Ripley was a devout attention to detail; though many of his discoveries may seem extreme, they were researched thoroughly, a fact that was not lost on newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who syndicated Believe It Or Not! and produced a book edition based on Riple! y's writings in 1929. 
A mix of obscure facts, figures and funny-peculiar sights and sounds from around the globe, each reel is hosted by the personable Ripley himself, though the globe-trotting exploits are sadly kept to a minimum. For instance, the first episode finds him at his drawing desk, coming up with images to illustrate his trivia, the editing allowing him to create quite detailed pictures seemingly within seconds. There are increasing amounts of location inserts as the series progresses, but much of it is studio bound. Each reel (episodes vary only slightly in length from around six to nine minutes on average) has Ripley in a different fixed set up: in the second film he's in a courtroom, having to prove his sometimes wild tales; in the third on a luxury liner, recounting his exploits to the journalists who have come to greet hi! m.
Ripley himself isn't always too confident in front of the camera, but then again who was in the very early days of sound, where one had to hit a mark and make sure they were facing a microphone. Ripley's also hampered a little by not having a script in front of him as he doubtlessly did for radio, and that he may trip over a line of dialogue here and there is perfectly understandable given that he's either attempting to remember hundreds of facts, surreptitiously read off cue cards or making sure to try and nail things first time around, second or third takes being almost unknown for such short film making. 
Breaking up the presentation style are a number of other factors: Ripley doesn't always just recite to camera, he often has an audience in the film with him, and the many stories are illustrated not only by his drawings, photographs, location film footage and performing guests, but by a few fun, if obviously simple, animated sequences. Thus, alongside such curios as the worlds largest chair, the clock that strikes thirteen hours, a house of cards and a dismantling/reassembling automobile, such items as the fish that shoots water at insects in order to catch them, the man who can restyle his hair through thought, and the man who was swallowed by a whale only to be rescued by his shipmates hours later, can be "seen" just as they actually happened, believe it or not!
The very point of the Warner Archives is to bring material to disc in simple editions that are more focused on getting rarities out there rather than dressing them up with any special new bonuses that would only delay their release further. As such, there's nothing in the way of actual "bonus" content, and the menus themselves (offering a Play All option or a listing of each "episode") are as basic as they need to be. If there's anything that could have been added without any cost to the Studio, it would surely have to be the 1939 Warners cartoon Believe It Or Else!, an Egghead parody of this very series directed by Tex Avery, which must exist as a master somewhere since it used to play on television. 
On the soundtrack side of things, it's a little bit more like one might expect: early 1930s recording technology was in its infancy, and Believe It Or Not! wasn't exactly lavished with production dollars. Much of this results in a soundtrack where the voices must break through the limitations of the microphones of the time, though with the volume cranked up, it should be clear enough to hear what Ripley and his featured friends have to say, Episode 8 being the reel with the most signal noise.
Where Ripley's Believe It Or Not! really scores in this disc package is with its cover artwork, sporting the new-look Warner Archive Collection style with a snazzy new cover design for the line, which breaks away from the uniformed approach so far of just the title treatment and a poster image for something that looks much more like a mainstream release. Still saving design costs, original theatrical poster art is employed to good effect, while the back of the sleeve and disc artwork feature updated versions of the WB Archive designs. 
I remain a big fan of the Warner Archives and the many titles, especially like these collections, that have been brought to DVD and might otherwise be languishing in the back of a vault somewhere. Not only do such sets actually provide good value in terms of what one is paying for in the running time, but they serve up previously hard to see material, and I look forward to sampling more from Warner Brothers' early Vitaphone days via such collections as the Warner Bros. Big Band, Jazz And Swing Short Subject Collection already available, as well as again putting out my own aforementioned hopes for the very funny RKO comedy shorts of such robust performers as Edgar Kennedy and Leon Errol.
