No, really, THIS is the last shorts day...

After a dreary, rainy week, where it dropped to the 30s at night, and we lit our first fires of the season, it suddenly got hot again. Off to Shiawassee!

Told you it was hot:

Highland Rec (surprisingly crowded)

Film review: The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)

 

Apparently Ernst Lubitsch, who directed some classic early screwball(ish) comedies, also invented the movie musical.  Learning this prompted me to buy a boxset of his early ones (curse you, 50% sale at Criterion.com!), of which this is one.  I picked this one to watch first because it has a killer cast of Claudette Colbert, Maurice Chevalier (who seems to have been a Lubitsch favorite) and Miriam Hopkins.  As you might expect, it's a bit of a tug of love: the film starts with Chevalier going with a (married) friend to see a violin-playing girl with whom the friend is smitten, as she performs at a beer garden (the film is set in Vienna).  Of course, Chevalier falls for her (Colbert) and, after inviting her back to his place to play duets (and while this film is stuffed with double entendres, in this case they actually do, because he has a piano), persuades her, against her better judgment, to stay for breakfast (pre-code!).  At breakfast they sing a song about breakfast silly enough to be worthy of Monty Python.  But, alas for Colbert's smitten Franzi, she is going to look back on this weakness with regret.  Not because Chevalier's Niki (the titular Lieutenant) is a cad (well, no more than you'd expect from Maurice Chevalier (who kept reminding me of Harry Enfield, for some reason)), but because of karma, I suppose.  Anyway, things seem to be going swimmingly for the happy couple, when Niki is called upon to stand honor guard for the visiting King of Flausenthurm and daughter, and spies Franzi waving at him, so gives her a saucy grin and lascivious wink.  Of course, the King's carriage chooses that moment to come between them, and the daughter spies the smile and wink (although she does not know what a wink is at the time) and is insulted.  She, of course, is Miriam Hopkins, who is perhaps the most inspired comic performer in the whole affair.  After the affair makes the papers, Niki is summoned to the palace to meet with the furious King (who was already feeling slighted for reasons that you'll have to watch the film to discover), and the only way that occurs to him to escape being hanged is to claim that the smile was solely out of happiness at seeing someone so beautiful as the princess.  This is supposed to be a stretch, because the princess is dressed frumpily, with the Princess Leia hair danishes.  She is also (note ignorance of winks) virginal, and consequently falls hard for Niki's blandishments.  To keep him around, she arranges for him to be her personal guard, and while this works well for Niki for a while (he sings a song with Colbert about how his 12 hour nights are spent with her, while his 8 hour days are spent with the princess), things get worse when the princess decides she shall have him as her husband.  "Can't happen," you think, "because Niki and Franzi are destined for each other!"  Well, that's post-pre-code thinking, because (spoiler alert), not only does he eventually end up with her, he finally falls for her after the soft-hearted Franzi has given her a makeover (which involves shedding several layers, getting a haircut, learning how to play jazz instead of "Cloister Bells" on the piano, and chain-smoking) to the very pre-code number "Jazz up your lingerie".  

So... Franzi ends up with nobody?  Yup!  As she says, ruefully, that's what happens to girls who stay for breakfast...

Chillier at Metamora-Hadley

Windy!

No, THIS is the last shorts day

Devon is indeed pretty, but I don't remember colors like this

A stroll by Pontiac Lake

The view from the fifth floor of French Hall