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7.1/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 7.1/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. The Merry Widow remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
If you like your movies dripping with 1930s opulence and don’t mind a plot that’s thinner than a sheet of tissue paper, you’ll probably have a blast. If you’re the type of person who gets annoyed when characters break into song to explain how they feel instead of, you know, just talking, stay far away from this one. It’s a very specific kind of old-school charm that either hits you or makes you want to check your watch every five minutes.
Maurice Chevalier is doing his whole routine here. He’s all smiles, tilted hats, and that heavy, heavy accent. It works for about twenty minutes. After that, it starts to feel a bit like he’s performing for the people in the back row of a massive theater rather than for a camera.
Jeanette MacDonald looks like she’s having the time of her life, though. There’s this one sequence involving a giant mirror that is so clearly a massive technical flex for 1934 that I couldn't help but grin. You can almost see the director, Ernst Lubitsch, patting himself on the back for pulling it off.
The whole thing feels like a stage play that someone accidentally gave way too much money to build sets for. Everything is so shiny and expensive. It’s almost exhausting to look at. I found myself missing the grit of something like The Kid's Last Fight, which at least felt like it had some dirt under its fingernails.
There are moments where the humor just… lands with a thud. Edward Everett Horton is around to be the flustered guy, which he does fine, but it’s a bit like watching a clockwork toy wind down. You know exactly what’s coming next.
I caught myself staring at the background extras in the ballroom scene. Half of them look like they’re just waiting for their lunch break. One guy in the back left is definitely yawning when he thinks the camera isn’t looking. It’s those little, messy moments that I actually liked the most.
The music is fine, I guess. It’s very catchy in that "I’m going to have this stuck in my head for three days" kind of way, which is a curse. It’s nowhere near as weird or interesting as the stuff you’d find in So This Is Paris, but it gets the job done.
It’s not a bad movie. It’s just very, very much its own thing. A relic of a time when people wanted their movies to look like a dream, even if that dream was a little bit repetitive and noisy.
IMDb —
1919
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