4 out of 5

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

Yes, in the grand pantheon of film, this is fine, and even with a narrowed view of only Hitchcock’s directed works… it’s good. But if we go even more zoomed in and break Hitch’s films up into their eras, his British talkies have – to my very unlearned eyes and ears – three phases: post-silent films, pre-Hollywood films, and The Stuff In Between, or B.T.s > SiBs, much more legibly.

While my chronology gets a little wonky if we try to assess filming order, going by release order, things line up: right after this operetta – an also-narrow genre of musicals based on German media – Hitch would direct The Man Who Knew Too Much, kicking off his moreso association with mystery and suspense films, and prepping him to be a Hollywood auteur. The late 20s / early 30s so a slew of… not great flicks that were clearly struggles to “understand” the new dimension sound should play in films; and so inbetween, in the SiBs, we briefly got some fairly quality genre flicks that show the director’s growing confidence with not only sound, but actually directing his actors, and mingling drama and comedy and thrills and so on together in a much more seamless fashion. He got less showy with his experimentation, while retaining command over the screen.

Most telling (again, to my non-historian self) is how even the films that were apparently not of great interest to Hitch – such as this stage musical adaptation, which is a fictionalized overview of Johan Strauss II’s debut to the public as a composer, much to his famous father’s ire – how even these in-it-for-the-paycheck films are really visually and thematically strong. And I’m not try to reach too far out to praise this: I called it “fine” to start, but I should qualify that that means it’s very watchable. It’s funny, there are some great production pieces, and some really fun pans and framings employed / chosen; as a standalone experience, you walk away satisfied at its popcorn, all’s-well presentation, and then further study might reveal how competently it’s put together. So then purposefully viewed in reference to Hitch’s growing abilities with sound films (the SiBs; have you forgotten??), it’s very much top tier.

But you can see qualifiers baked in there: while I’d say this is a very complete movie, in that its main characters each get arcs, and there is a legitimate beginning, middle, and end – Johann II (Esmond Knight) begins composing The Blue Danube waltz, caught between inspiration from his longtime love, Resi (Jessie Matthews), and the support of local Countess Helga (Fay Compton), also creating a bit of a love triangle to get sorted alongside Johann’s completion of the waltz – it also treats all of this as play, and lacks even the feints towards layers of The Skin Game or Murder!; it’s really just about giving us some Archie Andrews / Betty / Veronica style hijinks, with the payoff of a very recognizable musical number, and a comedic insert in the form of Prince Gustav (Frank Vosper).

Historical accuracy and depth – nah. Formative Hitchcock work, absolutely, but it’s more than formative, or the work of a “talented amateur” as he would say about The Man Who Knew Too Much: it’s precisely directed, acted, shot and edited, and is part of the peak of Hitch’s pre-Hollywood talkies.