Naughty Marietta

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Leslie M This was the first and (to be honest) maybe the last Nelson Eddy & Jeanette MacDonald movie I will ever see. I loved it. The repartee between the two leads is not dated at all. The lines are written & delivered with the same sass & sophistication as Nick & Nora. The singing surely compares well to Howard Keel and Jane Powell. Throw in Frank Morgan and Elsa Lanchester? I can't ask for anything more on a stormy Saturday night spent cleaning up my DVR. Much love to TCM! Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 07/14/24 Full Review John F A delightful comedy. The music is quite different from today's styles, and takes some getting used to. The interplay between MacDonald and Eddy is breezy and effortless, rare in today's over-the-top rom-coms. Some jokes are so sly that one only recognizes them after the moment. "Naughty Marietta" is most interesting as a piece of cinematic history; MGM did quite a lot with 1935's tools and techniques. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/23/23 Full Review Audience Member If old-fashioned operettas with lots of full-bodied singing and coy charm aren't your idea of entertainment, then steer clear of NAUGHTY MARIETTA--which, frankly, was somewhat of a museum piece even when first released in '35, belonging, as it did, to a style of musical theater that had long passed. But back then, NELSON EDDY and JEANETTE MacDONALD were a hot singing duo, and MGM would soon be casting them in film after film, based usually on hoary old operetta-type stories. Unless today's musical fans have a taste for this kind of singing, they're likely to find the film totally unbearable. I can still succumb to the charm of this kind of story and to these singers, for Nelson's baritone is one of the best you're ever likely to hear on screen--only Howard Keel and Gordon MacRae come close to approximating it. As for the story, it has to be taken with a grain of salt--a simple bit of nonsense about a princess escaping from France and ending up in Louisiana, where she gradually falls in love with a man who helped rescue her from French pirates. It's a slender tale on which Victor Herbert strung some of his golden melodies, sung to the max by MacDonald and Eddy. As a singer myself (I was in The Friendly Sons of St. Patrick Glee Club, a club started by Victor Herbert himself), we sometimes did the Herbert melodies as part of our repertoire. FRANK MORGAN and ELSA LANCHESTER as the governor and his wife add the required amount of broad humor and the sets and costumes have that lavish MGM look. Pleasant, if not the most memorable teaming of MacDonald and Eddy. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/08/23 Full Review steve d Entertaining enough but it has been done better. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 03/30/23 Full Review Audience Member "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life" is a song used to great effect in the classic comedy Young Frankenstein (1974) which clearly intends to put it's ridiculously cheery and glib lyrics to ironic use. This 1935 Jeanette MacDonald vehicle does not take anything in the lyrics of the song to be anything less than the honest truth and this makes the film feel like a parody of the sort of entertainment that would become endorsed by the Catholic Legion of Decency just a few years later. I did find the film difficult to take seriously as while it is a ‘comedy' it features none of the subversion of Ernst Lubitsch, a frequent collaborator of MacDonald's, and was altogether silly and pointless. Spoilt Princess Marie of France, Jeanette MacDonald, decides that she does not want to go through with an arranged marriage to the older Don Carlos de Braganza, Walter Kingsford. She escapes by pretending to be a poor servant "Marietta" and boards a ship to New Orleans, Louisiana as a ‘comfort girl' along with a group of other poor maids and servants. She falls in love with the ship's captain Richard Warrington, Nelson Eddy, while on board but his brutish behavior and her entitlement keep them apart. She discovers herself when she arrives in New Orleans and begins working as a singer in a local club but the authorities have started searching for the princess and so she is forced to hide. It is at this point in time that Warrington realizes that he is deeply in love with her and arrives at the club to romance her into spending the rest of her life with him. The two spend a brief amount of time together as a couple before she is captured by the employees of her father and forced to return to her miserable life. MacDonald proves that she really struggles without a strong supporting cast behind her as while Elsa Lanchester does her best with a shamefully underwritten role she does not match up to Maurice Chevalier or Clark Gable. She paired with Eddy in several other films, this is supposedly one of their weaker efforts, but I am surprised that audiences lapped them up as a pairing because to me the two of them seemed to lack chemistry and felt vaguely lost when on screen together. Chevalier was not a great actor by any stretch of the imagination but he did have a goofy charm that complemented MacDonald in her prim young wife roles. There was none of that joy in the scenes between Eddy and MacDonald as you do not believe that they love each other or even hate each other but that they feel only a mild apathy for their love interest. Their bond was intended to be the heart of the story and propel the plot forward but I would rather have them played by two actors with an authentic connection who have not been cast based on their singing ability or their physical appearance. The musical numbers in the film, presumably the selling point, drop in out of nowhere as when something to do with the story would appear to start happening we find ourselves staring into MacDonald's rigid face and cold eyes. She lacks the passion that she possessed in One Hour with You (1932) here as the film adopts the same style as a Deanna Durbin vehicle and a close up shot of MacDonald will be stubbornly held in place while she grunts out a song. We are not given any sense of her performing as our experience of the musical numbers is limited to hearing her voice and seeing her face which is more often than not blank. I needed some of the cute little gestures that made her so lively and charming in other films or at least I needed her to stop looking like a prisoner as while she belts out lyrics about being over the moon but seems like she is anything but. MacDonald deserves her reputation as a singer and to some degree an actress from her collaborations with Chevalier alone but she does not have enough star power to carry a film alone and that is why this film does not become one of the great musicals of the 1930s. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 02/01/23 Full Review Audience Member The best musical romance movie ever made! With the best movie song ever sung: Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life! Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 02/26/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Naughty Marietta

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