Leicht französisch

It begins like Detlef Sierck's "das Hofkonzert.";in both movies ,the star is no longer available and they need a replacement ;music and dance make almost 50% of the movie in both although the German one was operetta .There the comparison ends.

It's a carnival dancer ,a would be folies bergères ex-artist who will play the part ; then the script turns Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" : her manners are not adequate , her grammar is worse ,so he asks a teacher to use phonetics to make a duchess out of the Flower Girl. Dancing ,singing and glamour are no problem for Miss Lamour , who even tries to live up to her so called reputation by learning a little bit of French (one can hear her utter "n'est-ce pas? " (in French,there's no problem with don't it ?and doesn't it ?,for it translates everything) ,"bonjour monsieur" ;hence the title .

But wouldn't Mary O'Leary lose her whole identity in the process when she became Rochelle Olivia ? And eventually won't his creator(Don amèche) be caught out at his own game ?

As it often happens in Douglas Sirk's imitation of life, reality and performances (the row between the director and his star) are difficult to distinguish;in his book , "exquisite ironies and magnificent obsessions ", Tom Ryan points out that his happy endings are often ironical and double-entendre.

Don Ameche was on the decline in his career and Dorothy Lamour still trying to acheive stardom outside those "Road" movies when this movie was made. It tries to borrow from Ameche's earlier hits with Alice Faye but the formula does not work here because Lamour is no Faye. And she is expected to carry it. Supporting performances from Page and Kennard is good but not enough. If it were made today, it would make a good video rental.

Adorable movie with some beautifully shot scenes. I enjoyed it and my benchmark for this category is the Tracy-Hepburn movies. It is entertaining because of the period decor, costume. The plot is one of a romantic comedy.

SLIGHTLY FRENCH is a delightful little trifle starring Dorothy Lamour as a cynical carnival performer who is wooed by movie director Don Ameche to star in his new movie and feign being a great French star imported to America for the film. (Interestingly, this very plot was used that same year in IT'S A GREAT FEELING with Doris Day - and Day's Faux French femme's last name was Lamour!!!). Elegantly filmed by cultish director Douglas Sirk, SLIGHTLY FRENCH is not a classic but it's a very appealing little comedy/musical/drama with two excellent stars. Cannot believe one reviewer on IMDb wrote Lamour "never became a movie star" away from Hope and Crosby, she was only one of the biggest stars 1936-1949 in pictures and in 1941 was VARIETY magazine's top female box-office attraction. She starred in many excellent films sans Bob or Bing, THE HURRICANE, THE FLEET'S IN, JOHNNY APOLLO, SPAWN OF THE NORTH, etc. You'll note she gets billing over Ameche in this film. Alas, few of the big movie stars of the era have had their careers locked away in the vaults as Dorothy has - most of her films were at Paramount, and Universal (which now owns the 1930-1948 Paramount films) has done a very poor job getting most of them in circulation so most do only know her today from the Road movies. She was a great singer, a delightful screen star, and a fairly good actress too. Here's hoping this Columbia release will show up on Turner Classic Movies soon so more can see this lovely glamour girl in this underrated gem.

To totally disagree with the previous reviewers, I think that this, together with all other early Sirk movies I've seen, is nothing short of staggering. Filled with one-liners worthy of a Howard Hawks/Ben Hecht movie, it's not only early evidence of Sirk's genius for space and light and shadow, but also a highly sophisticated and perverse rendition of the Pygmalion theme. It's a measure of Sirk's genius that the characters, though formulaic, spring to life as in a Greek tragedy - or a Raoul Walsh, CB de Mille etc. movie- through the sheer strength of stereotype. Here, as elsewhere, Sirk is a bit like Frank Sinatra: cool and detached on surface, but revealing underneath the filth and the fury ;> I saw it today (6APR07) at the Film Forum NYC and it blew me away. Someone release it in DVD fast, it's an (to my knowledge) unsung masterpiece.