Word: operetta
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Naughty Marietta (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is Victor Herbert's 25-year-old operetta, revived as the vehicle for the first important cinema performance of Baritone Nelson Eddy. It concerns a French Princess who, to avoid a manage de convenance to a Spanish grandee, disguises herself as a peasant girl and joins a boatload of female emigrants whom the King is shipping to New Orleans as brides for his colonists. In New Orleans, Marietta (Jeanette MacDonald) promptly makes the acquaintance of a dashing young soldier (Eddy) in a coonskin cap. There are obstacles to their romance: to avoid marrying...
This preposterous scrap of Americana is so well suited to the needs of sentimental cinema that it may well make cinemaddicts wonder why Hollywood's operetta impresarios bother to invent stodgy plots for their productions instead of adapting the up-to-date inventions of the past. Admirers of Victor Herbert will not need to be reminded that the score of Naughty Marietta contains, in addition to "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life," such minor classics as "I'm Falling in Love with Someone," "The Italian Street Song," and "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp." Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald sing them to perfection...
...delightful tradition of semi-Viennese operetta "The Night Is Young" succeeds in achieving a good deal of the champagne in three-quarter time atmosphere. Evelyn Laye is physically charming and vocally superb as the ballet girl with whom the Hapsburg heir falls in love. Ramon Novarro is smilingly efficient as the unfortunate prince who must give up love for the duties of the throne and the good of his people--a decision which carries little conviction to a 1935 audience which likes to see its princes happy in the arms of their commoner sweethearts. Charles Butterworth and Una Merkel carry...
Among the selections on the program are four Elizabethan madrigals by Woelkos and Byrd, two works by Bach, an old English folksong arranged by Edward T. Canby 1G, and a chorus from the Handel operetta, "Admeta...
...Night Is Young (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). This pallid operetta deals heavily with a princeling's love for a commoner. The Austrian emperor's nephew and heir (Ramon Novarro) is enamored of a big-eyed, winsome ballet dancer (Evelyn Laye), hired to cover his dalliance with a countess. Duty demands that he marry a princess and in the end he does so but not before he and the dancer spend an apparently comfortable night on top of a Ferris wheel...