Ernst Lubitsch - The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)

In the years after a rigid Production Code imposed morality on American cinema, occasionally a studio would go begging to the Production Code Administration. The studio would say, "Hey, we have this movie that was made before the Code. Please, please can we rerelease it?" Often the PCA would say no, but sometimes it would say, "OK, sure, but only if you make these cuts."
Paramount went to the PCA in 1936 with such a request concerning director Ernst Lubitsch's "The Smiling Lieutenant" (1931) - one of the four films included in the Criterion Collection's new Eclipse series DVD package "Lubitsch Musicals." PCA chief Joseph Breen screened the movie and came back suggesting not one or two or three cuts - but 27. Basically, he suggested turning the movie into a short subject. But he was really saying something else. He was asking Paramount how it could waste his time on such licentious, offensive trash when everyone knew it was his job to shield the public from such monstrous, amoral horrors as "The Smiling Lieutenant."

These days people are bound to feel differently about "The Smiling Lieutenant," and the three other musicals in the four-DVD set. The films, made from 1929 to 1932, are some of the most urbane - and in some cases risque - that Hollywood produced at that time.

Three of the movies star Maurice Chevalier, a name probably unknown to younger movie fans and misunderstood by even those familiar with him. Today, to the extent that he's remembered at all in America, he's an old man singing "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" on a park bench in 1958's "Gigi." In fact, to know Chevalier for that alone would be like knowing Paul McCartney solely for his most recent album. In Chevalier's prime - captured in this series - he embodied onscreen a character that was libidinous, playful, insinuating and sexually rapacious. He was America's idea of a Frenchman: charming, fun-loving and sexually insatiable.

With Chevalier onscreen, it was always understood that he has gone to bed with hundreds if not thousands of women and has been faithful to none of them, but no one minds because, hey, he's French. He is impish, and his behavior borders on ridiculous, but there's a wise current underneath, an Old World understanding that the pleasures of life are the essence of life. Descriptions can go only so far. Imagine explaining Mae West to someone who has never seen her. You need to see this guy.

"The Smiling Lieutenant" (1931) finds Chevalier at the ideal place in his stardom, established but still flowering. He stars as a lieutenant who is flirting with his mistress (Claudette Colbert) one day as a parade goes by. A frumpy visiting princess (Miriam Hopkins, who is hysterically funny) happens to be passing, thinks he's making eyes at her and becomes offended, provoking an international incident. What scandalized the censors is that the movie makes a mockery of marriage and celebrates premarital and extramarital sex, which is reinforced by the film's slightly wistful and sophisticated ending...

Language    English
Subtitles    included: English, in Vobsub

http://www.filesonic.com/file/955338494/The_Smiling_Lieutenant_%281931%29.part1.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/955339614/The_Smiling_Lieutenant_%281931%29.part2.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/955298014/The_Smiling_Lieutenant_%281931%29.part3.rar

ENGLİSH SUBTİTLES (Not included in file)