Based on the handful I have seen so far, I highly recommend Lubitsch films. Two that are not part of this collection Ninotchka (1939) and the silent The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg (1927) rank among the best films I have seen.
Until this box set, as with so many vintage films from the period, the only way that most people wishing to see the films could do so was through bootleg copies that are sometimes made available in various Internet venues by collectors and film enthusiasts - and quite often such bootlegs are blurry after several generations of VHS copying and recopying. This is not only an opportunity for these films to find a wider audience, it will enable fans to obtain high quality, restored copies.
Of the four films in the box set, I have have seen and can comment on One Hour With You and The Smiling Lieutenant. I highly recommend both - even to modern audiences who are not necessarily into the 1930s scene. As part of the recommendation, I should point out that I am often very hesitant to recommend movie musicals from this period to those who are not already hard-core fans of the era. Beyond the primitive production qualities of the early talkie musicals, very often the plots - or what barely passes for a plot - are trite and tedious. Even I have been known to grow impatient and fast forward to the song and dance scenes knowing full well that I am not missing out on much. A great many of the musicals and comedies of that era simply do not age well.
This is not the case with either One Hour With You or The Smiling Lieutenant. Both films are refreshingly charming yet sophisticated. And both have a wonderful, light-hearted benevolence that has long since completely disappeared from our popular culture. They are like a window to a very different world that has sadly been lost. And, unlike a lot of movie musicals from the period, they have storylines that are actually engaging and that you do not feel like you have seen a thousand times before. Nor is the music the typical fare found in the Jazz Age Hollywood revues that dominated the genre (not that there is anything wrong with such music - I am a big fan): both feature elegant and lush scores by Viennese operetta composer Oscar Straus.
Both films - especially The Smiling Lieutenant - are also very pre-Code and contain scenes and situations that simply would not have been allowed by the Hollywood censors had they been made a few years later. Films from this period were pretty much locked away after they had their run in theaters and were forgotten about. When television came on the scene in the late 1940s, there was a sudden need by stations for content to fill out their broadcast day - and for this they turned to the dusty old film vaults of the Hollywood studios. Television is what ended up being the salvation of a great many 1930s films which existed on highly unstable celluloid film and would otherwise have simply deteriorated had reprints not been made as a result of their new-found broadcast viability. Unfortunately, on occasion, certain scenes from pre-Code films were considered to be too suggestive or shocking for presentation on 1950s era television - and some scenes from One Hour With You ended up being edited out for that reason. Matt tells me, however, that the cut scenes have been added back in the new Criterion release.
The Smiling Lieutenant, on the other hand, was not rereleased for television audiences as there was simply no way of editing out the fact that Maurice Chevalier and Claudette Colbert's characters were living together and - well, doing the sort of stuff that young unmarried men and women who live together do. Paramount actually wanted to rerelease the film in theaters in 1936 but was unable to get it past the Production Code Administration which insisted on no less than 27 edits. As a result, the film was presumed to be lost for many decades until a copy turned up in a European vault sometime in the 1970s.
Of the two, I think that One Hour With You, which features Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald, is the best one for modern audiences to start with. Despite its vintage and the fact that there is a tendency for comedy not to age well, the film is still very witty and, as I have already mentioned, incredibly charming.
The Smiling Lieutenant, staring Maurice Chevalier and Claudette Colbert, is also a very nice film - but for me it is special because it is movie adaptation of my all-time favorite operetta, Oscar Straus's A Waltz Dream (Ein Walzertraum) which dates back to 1908. The music from the operetta is incredibly beautiful and is featured throughout the film.
The film collection is available at Amazon.com
The list price is $69.99 - but if you follow the "other sellers" link, you can get for as little as $44. Not only is that a decent price for four films, unlike releases of modern mass market films, Criterion releases are issued in limited quantities and, once they are sold out, used copies frequently go for full price or more. For that reason, if you are interested, you will probably want to order quickly before it is no longer easily available.I did find two excerpts of One Hour With You on YouTube. The first clip is from early in the movie and features a very pretty Oscar Straus tune.
The second clip features the film's title song. Unlike the music rest of the music in the movie, this is not an Oscar Straus song but rather a Leo Robin/Richard Whiting composition. I very much enjoy this scene - though to fully appreciate it and the wonderful expressions on the characters' faces it is necessary to be familiar with the storyline. The band visible in the scene, by the way, is Jimmie Grier's orchestra which was, at the time, performing in the famed Cocoanut Grove at the recently destroyed Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Donald Novis performs the initial vocal in the clip and he later recorded the same song with the Grier orchestra on 78 rpm for Victor - a recording which turned up decades later in another great film, Paper Moon.
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