The white parade 1934 rare film
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#The white parade 1934 rare film archive
“The Merry Widow,” which has now been released by the Warner Archive Collection in a remastered edition with a much improved image and soundtrack, stands apart from the earlier musicals, both because it is based on an established piece (Franz Lehár’s 1905 operetta, which had already inspired two silent-film adaptations, by Michael Curtiz and Erich von Stroheim), and because it was made at MGM, where the atmosphere was hardly as free as it was at libertine Paramount. In his films, Paris becomes the fantasy capital of perfect freedom, tolerance and joie de vivre, qualities that were becoming difficult to find in the real Paris of the Depression, and by 1934, essentially unknown in Lubitsch’s hometown.
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Lubitsch, who was born into a prosperous Jewish family in Berlin in 1892, supposedly told an interviewer: “I have been to Paris, France, and Paris, Paramount. “The Merry Widow” stars Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier (in the last of their musicals together) and/or France, which for Lubitsch was a mythical kingdom in itself.
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(All four of those films are available in an essential box set from Criterion’s Eclipse line, “Lubitsch Musicals.”) Released in October 1934, “The Merry Widow” brought to an end the spirited series of musicals - operettas, really - that Ernst Lubitsch had begun with his first sound film, “The Love Parade,” in 1929, and continued through “Monte Carlo” (1930), “The Smiling Lieutenant” (1931) and “One Hour With You” (1932).