The Merry Widow (1952)

The TCM lineup for tonight in prime time going through to the start of tomorrow's prime time lineup is Oscar-nominated movies that are remakes of earlier films. One that's on my DVR that I hadn't seen before is the 1952 version of The Merry Widow, which you can see tomorrow (Feb. 25) at 7:00 AM. So once again, I made the point of sitting down to watch the movie in order to be able to write up this review.

Now, the first thing I have to say is that I have not seen the Franz Lehár operetta on which this movie is based, nor have I seen the 1934 movie, so I'm judging this one on its own merits. I of course knew the famous "Merry Widow Waltz" both from piano lessons when I was a kid as well as its use in the Alfred Hitchcock movie Shadow of a Doubt where the widows didn't exactly stay merry for long. This version opens literally at the turn of the 20th century in Washington DC where everybody is celebrating at the various countries' embassies. Well, every embassy but one, the embassy of the fictional central European monarchy of Marshovia. Marshovia is a nearly bankrupt country, and the ambassador can't even pay the embassy's rent.

But the ambassador gets a coded cable from the king (Thomas Gomez) that there are three Marshovians living in the US, and one of them died, having emigrated to America and become an exceedingly wealthy man, leaving his widow with $80 million, a hugh fortune by the standards of 1900. Perhaps she can be convinced to come to Marshovia to dedicate a statue to her husband, although this would really just be a ruse to get her to use her fortune to help pay off the national debt.

The ambassador and his aide, Popoff (Richard Haydn), visit the widow, Crystal Radek (Lana Turner), who has a very capable secretary in the form of Kitty Riley (Una Merkel). Eventually Crystal does agree, and the two women head off for Marshovia, where the King has planned a big reception at the train station, except for the fact that the train is late getting there so everybody has gone a block or two away to party when the train arrives, leaving Crystal and Kitty to hear the joyous singing and see the dancing only from a distance and make their way to the palace by themselves.

The king has a military officer, Count Danilo (Fernando Lamas), whom he knows to be quite the ladies' man, and Danilo's singing has already impressed the two women. So the king comes up with a detailed schedule of how Danilo should seduce Crystal so that she'll marry him, at which point Danilo can use the estate to pay off the national debt. Mind you, this is supposed to be a light comic operetta. And the king can order Danilo to do this. Some of the king's ladies-in-waiting aren't thrilled, so they put the copy of Danilo's agenda in the envelope that accompanies the flowers Danilo is going to give Crystal. The point is that Crystal will find this and understand that the wooing is a sham.

Things get complicated when Danilo goes to see Crystal but Kitty answers, and Danilo gets the mistaken impression that Kitty is in fact Crystal. But when the two women see the agenda, they get fed up with Marshovia and leave for Paris, where Crystal gets a bunch of suitors. Danilo eventually follows, and Crystal is willing to let Kitty pretend to be her. Meanwhile, the real Crystal meets Danilo but hides her real identity and kinda-sorta falls in love with Danilo except for the fact that Danilo is on a mercenary mission. Crystal, calling herself Fifi, completely bowls over Danilo, who falls in love with her but can't go further because the King requires him to marry Crystal. And, of course, he can't find Fifi either, until the film's climax....

This version of The Merry Widow was made in Technicolor and is lovely to look at. It's not a surprise that the film's Oscar nominations were in the color technical categories, from the era when set and costume design had separate awards for color and black-and-white movies. Fernando Lamas does most of the singing here, and there's quite a bit of singing and dancing. This may slow the movie down for the sort of people who, like me, aren't the biggest fans of musicals or opera. I also have to admit that I find the plot of a mercenary marriage a bit mean, although the way the screenplay here gets around the Production Code more or less works.