Two lovers, locked in a room—the future of the state itself depends on whether their roiling lust for each other will override their other emotions and compel them into a marriage. The last time these two saw each other, Danilo (Maurice Chevalier) thought Sonia (Jeanette MacDonald) was a whore. The first time they saw each other, Sonia knew Danilo was a gigolo. And if all this talk of prostitution sounds tawdry, just remember that is in fact what this is all about: the King has ordered Danilo to seduce Sonia because unless she has a compelling reason to stick around in the Ruritanian kingdom of “Marshovia” she’ll take her wealth with her, crippling the economy. This is about trading money for sex, and sex for money.
Fans of high culture of course know this story as the beloved Merry Widow (which is just this weekend finishing a glorious run at Chicago’s Lyric Opera–awesome stuff). Franz Lehar’s opera had been entertaining audiences around the world since its Vienna premiere in 1905. But the prudish censors who governed Hollywood in 1934 weren’t what you’d call fans of high culture. For them, Ernst Lubitsch’s film version of The Merry Widow was just a piece of smut.
So how exactly did this thing get made in the first place? And what did it have to do with the Marx Brothers?
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We start with a man returning home. He removes his hat, he climbs the stairs to the bedroom, he opens the door—and there is his wife, in bed, startled and a little guilty. She’s talking fast, like she’s nervous, trying to cover for something, a distraction. The man opens his closet to put away his coat and tie—and there is Groucho!
“Believe it or not, I’m waiting for a streetcar.”
Before the husband even has a chance to properly stoke his jealousy, a clanging streetcar actually arrives in the bedroom! Groucho boards and rides away!
I can’t include a screengrab from this, because it was never filmed. Ernst Lubitsch cooked the idea up for his proposed contribution to the omnibus film If I Had a Million. Exactly why the pieces never came together, I don’t know—some facts get lost to the ages, you know—but this was as close as the greatest comedy director of all time came to working with the greatest comedy team of all time (those are my personal opinions, mind you. Your mileage may vary).
(Let’s also note that a variation on that scene, a little less absurd and Marxian but still recognizably the same idea, does appear in The Merry Widow. Why waste a good idea?)
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Ernst was feeling his O’s at the time. He’d made masterpieces like Trouble in Paradise and Design For Living—daring, provocative comedies that all but spat in the faces of the self-appointed censors trying to impose their Puritan preoccupations on the nation’s popular culture.
And he was hitting these heights against a backdrop of utter desolation in Hollywood. Not a single film released in 1932 made good money. The years 1932-1934 were the very pits of the Great Depression. Hollywood was a desperate wounded animal, bleeding money and frantic to make safe, crowd-pleasing cost-conscious choices. Yet improbably, here was this funky little immigrant who made expensive movies about sex. There was nothing safe about a man whose idea of a romantic comedy was one in which the leading lady doesn’t chose between her two suitors, but happily shacks up with them both.
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Lubitsch got away with such shenanigans because of economics. His prestige films were hits—the studio bosses had a hard time saying “no” to a man who made them boatloads of money. And when he did hit a rough patch, his money-losing films were critical darlings and international hits that justified their losses with good PR.
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Meanwhile, the censors had a problem censoring Lubitsch—he didn’t just scatter sex references into his films where they could be easily cut out; he made films so fundamentally about sex that the censors’ only viable option was to ban them outright. But the censors weren’t a government body—they were an industry body created to insulate the filmmaking community from government action. In other words, they were there to protect the industry and its profits. So when Lubitsch confronted them with sex-obsessed films that cost a shocking amount of money to make the censors tended to throw up their hands in defeat and let his stuff slide rather than risk telling his studios that they couldn’t release them at all.
This didn’t last forever.
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Meanwhile, let’s bring Irving Thalberg into the story. He wanted to make a film version of The Merry Widow. His studio MGM had already made one ten years earlier (by Erich von Stroheim—everyone’s go-to guy for frothy sex comedies, right?) and he figured the market was ripe for a second go-round. Lubitsch was not on contract to MGM, but surely he could be had on a loan-out agreement, and who would be better for such a thing?
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Lubitsch in turn had his own idea about who was best suited to play the leads—why Maurice Chavalier and Jeanette MacDonald, of course! They had been his muses for several years now, even if both players were starting to tire of that arrangement.
Anita Loos took the first pass at writing a new scenario—Thalberg wanted to make sure the new film was different enough from Von Stroheim’s version that he didn’t have to pay any royalties. In my opinion, Loos was the perfect screenwriter for the gig, and it’s a real shame that she and Lubitsch never properly collaborated, because they seem to have such similar sensibilities. But if you get Lubitsch, you get his entourage, so he had his regular writers Ernest Vajda and Samson Raphaelson take another couple of drafts.
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This hints at something worth noting about this entire production: Lubitsch had the authority to bring in the cast and crew he wanted rather than be obligated to MGM’s roster of talents. He also had the right of final cut, a rarity in those days. Hell, the right of final cut remained a rarity for decades. But such was the power of the Lubitsch brand name.
But that power no longer extended to the censors, not in 1934. The newly emboldened Production Code office under Joseph Breen and Will Hays’ Legion of Decency were scandalized by Lubitsch’s utter disregard and contempt for their idea of decency. And they were no longer intimidated by his stature. The Merry Widow was MGM’s most expensive film to date, but that no longer swayed them. Their offices demanded various cuts—after the prints were made—at tremendous cost.
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That’s right—some poor sod had to unspool each and every release print and individually splice out the bits these two prudes couldn’t abide. And MGM had to eat that cost, and then stand by while audiences and critics treated the latest Lubitsch film as so much chopped liver. It lost money, it got poor notices. Ernst Lubitsch didn’t make another film for three years…
But…
Let’s rewind and tell that story again, from a slightly different perspective. Everything I just said is true, but there’s another story, buried in the first.
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That poor MGM intern stuck in the editing bay manually censoring every release print? That meant that the cuts were made “downstream” from the negative after it had been locked. Which means that the subsequent TV screenings and DVD releases came from the uncensored negative—Joe Breen and Will Hays cost MGM some money and heartburn in 1934, but their cuts were isolated in time and forgotten by posterity. The Merry Widow lived on, and has since been recognized as a proper masterpiece, unencumbered by their foolishness.
And Lubitsch’s three-year hiatus? Well, on February 4, 1935, he was appointed head of production at Paramount! If the censors wanted to marginalize his worldview, he just gained the ability to propagate it far wider than he ever would have been able to on his own.
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Ernst Lubitsch conquered Hollywood.