NFR Project: ‘Naughty Marietta’
Dir: Robert Z. Leonard, W.S. Van Dyke
Scr: Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, John Lee Mahin
Pho: William H. Daniels
Ed: Blanche Sewell
Premiere: March 29, 1935
103 min.
Ah, operetta! Though largely forgotten today, the operetta was a key link between the worlds of opera and the development of the musical comedy. Operettas are different from operas in that they contain spoken dialogue between numbers, and usually focus on a comic or romantic theme.
Beginning in the 1850s, composers such as Offenbach and Johan Strauss II created important operetta works such as Orphee aux enfers and Die Fledermaus. In America, wildly popular creations by composers such as Rudolph Friml and Sigmund Romberg ruled the stage from the middle of the 19th century through the 1920s.
The king of American operetta composers, though, was Victor Herbert, who wrote a remarkable 43 operettas. Naughty Marietta is his best-known work. In fact, the only reason many know of it is because its hit song, “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” was used to great comic effect in Mel Brooks’ movie Young Frankenstein. The joke, funny in itself, takes on more hilarity when considering the sweet, fairy-tale context of the song’s introduction.
Naughty Marietta was first produced in 1910. Set in 1780, it tells the story of a French princess (here, the great soprano singer Jeanette MacDonald) who flees her country to avoid an unwanted marriage. She disguises herself as a commoner and joins a cargo of women shipping off to the New World to make wives for lonely men there. She winds up with them in New Orleans, where they are briefly captured by pirates before being saved by a platoon of soldier-volunteers led by Captain Warrington (the marvelous baritone Nelson Eddy). The rest of the story outlines their at first prickly courtship.
The show contained no fewer than five hit songs, so it was a well-known entity to people of the day, many of whom would attend the 1935 film in a wash of nostalgia. They got their money’s worth – the film is lavishly produced, and makes use of the filmic space to expand the story, including an exciting clash with pirates and an extended cruise through the bayou.
The movie rests though, on the combination of Eddy and MacDonald. They were two powerful singers, and they could act (OK, Eddy is definitely more wooden). Together, their marvelous duets were enormously entertaining, and audiences of the day ate it up.
They made seven more musical films together over the next seven years. Box-office favorites, they were the top couple in film during those years. Offscreen, they carried on a tumultuous decades-long affair, even though married to others, often living together, until MacDonald’s death. They were real-life sweethearts. Even though the music is now deemed too saccharine and sentimental, it represents a key link in the evolution of music onstage. There are very few places in the culture ny more where two people in love sing bee-yoo-tiful melodies to each other under the soundstage’s arc lights.
The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: A Night at the Opera.
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