Word: widowing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Author Aden's title is a calculated come-on. The Duchess never finishes the well-known sentence and Author Arlen's advertised salacious spread, of course, proves a Barmecide's feast. His brillian-tined tale tells of a young, beautiful, rich but extremely respectable Duchess, a widow who is a model of propriety to less proper peers and inferiors, and of the ghostly suspicion that falls on her when London becomes the scene of a series of lustful murders...
...Merry Widow (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is the third and by far the best cinema version of Franz Lehar's famed operetta. The first was a two-reel monstrosity in which the late Alma Rubens and Wallace Reid performed in 1912. In 1925 Erich von Stroheim directed Mae Murray and John Gilbert in the second. Cinemaddicts who have seen all three are likely to find the current version, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, as far superior to the second as the second was to the first. Only the most captious critics could find any fault with a picture which fairly entranced...
...Lubitsch version, Captain Danilo (Maurice Chevalier) is dispatched from Marshovia to Paris to marry his country's richest widow (Jeanette MacDonald) lest she impoverish the royal treasury by marrying a foreigner. He goes to Maxim's for a farewell debauch, makes love to a cocotte who turns out to be the widow in disguise. Meeting her again at a diplomatic reception, he finds it impossible to convince her that his affection is sincere until he has been convicted of treason for failing in his mission...
...Stroheim Merry Widow, like the original operetta, concerned a Prince Danilo. The real Prince Danilo of Montenegro sued Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for libel, collected $4,000 in a Paris court. Well aware that 63-year-old Prince Danilo, living modestly near Nice, must have pricked up his ears when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer paid Princess Youssoupov $250,000 & costs for libelously dipping into the history of Russia and Rasputin (TIME, March 12; Aug. 20), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer took no chances with this new version of The Merry Widow. In addition to demoting the Prince to a Captain, they were careful...
...Being married to him kept me from enjoying any normal girlhood. I know it is too late now to try and go back and recapture the fine ecstasy of adolescence, but perhaps I may at least be a normal young widow now that poor 'Daddy's' death has removed the strange tie which has kept me from being either married or single through these eight years of separation...