The Smiling Lieutenant (Paramount) was expensively designed to provide Maurice Chevalier with proper and improper opportunities to display his ingratiating leer, wear a straw hat with dinner clothes, gurgle flip bedchamber music as the accompaniment of an amorous escapade. Ernst Lubitsch, hired to give the proceedings the correct continental air, used sarcastic burlesque to brighten up a plot which no one would need to be told came out of an Austrian novel. He had fairly good material to work with—the story of a young lieutenant who, during a review for visiting royalty,...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
