Champagne Waltz (Paramount). The perennial and expensive effort to make a Grace Moore out of Gladys Swarthout seemed to have more logic some time ago when Miss Moore was a more important box-office draw. This version of the endeavor is a heavy-footed musical naively designed to combine the best features of jazz with those of the Viennese waltz. It concerns one Buzzy Bellew (Fred MacMurray), leader of a swing band which, reaching Vienna in a continental tour, ruins the business of the Franz & Elsa Strauss Waltz Palace. In the U. S. consulate, Elsa (Gladys Swarthout), who has gone there to complain about her rival's tactics, meets Buzzy, mistakes him for the consul. Their romance begins when, he inducts her into the technique of chewing gum; nearly smashes when, in the picture's funniest sequence, she telephones the real consul to tell him she has swallowed her gum—a call which is intercepted, with much double entendre, by the consul's wife. After learning Buzzy's real identity, Elsa parts from him only to be reunited after many vicissitudes when he is a rundown member of a dilapidated supper band and she, in a new Waltz Palace, is the rage of Manhattan.
With an appealing tremble of her lower jaw, Miss Swarthout, smartly dressed, sings several songs. None of them is notable. Whatever merits Champagne Waltz possesses are dependent on the well-seasoned comic abilities of Jack Oakie, cast as Happy Gallagher, manager of the band. Badly befuddled by the ways of Europeans, Gallagher wanders through elaborate settings making remarks like "60 feet away you can't tell them apart and 60 days later you don't care. . . . All women drive you screwy except your mother and she drove your old man screwy." Best musical number: dream sequence of Johann Strauss playing his Blue Danube for the Emperor. Worst comedy sequence: members of Bellew's Band wriggling around in a trained seal act in which they shockingly resemble a familiar type of paralytic.
This week Champagne Waltz starts simultaneous showings in 80 theatres in 24 countries all over the globe. The wholesale premiere of the picture, which Paramount's Board Chairman Adolph Zukor picked as the most festive of Paramount's present crop, was only one of a series of ceremonies arranged to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his start in the cinema industry. The Zukor Silver Jubilee, which began Jan. 7 and will last, according to Paramount publicity, for 17 weeks, reached its peak two weeks before the Champagne Waltz premiere. At a Hollywood super-dinner to Producer Zukor, Cinema Tsar Will Hays called Producer Zukor "a splendid American', a great leader," Leopold Stokowski conducted a 150-piece orchestra, Paramount's contract players joined in a floor show which, on a basis of combined salaries involved, was doubtless the most expensive ever staged.