Oh... Rosalinda!!

We are big champagne fans and this movie was sponsored by a big French champagne outfit and it couldn't have been more appropriate. The post WWII Vienna setting was marvelously bubbly and clever. Where better to set such an international tale of deception and decadence.

With the recent US occupation of Iraq, this film may be newly relevant. After all,Oh ... Rosalinda! was a plea for an end to the occupation of Austria. The party was over in the mid50s. In another ten years, perhaps, there might be a wonderful remake set in Bagdad.

This 'lost' Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger movie updates Strauss' operetta Die Fledermaus to post-war Vienna, with the city under occupation by the four Allied powers. A romantic romp starring Anton Walbrook, Michael Redgrave and Ludmilla Tchérina as the titular object of desire, its primary pleasure is Hein Heckroth's gaudy décor, and it's not hard to see why it was a critical and commercial flop. If you want to see P&P meld opera and cinema to dazzling effect, try their previous film The Tales Of Hoffmann.

I just saw this film on a not-too-great VHS copy and wish it could be released on DVD. It would be a great companion to Tales of Hoffmann by the same team, though it is quite different in flavor.

As in Hoffmann, the film is full of dancing--but much of it has an improvised flavor, a polka down the hall, a can-can by Michael Redgrave in full military evening dress and kepi, as well as lots of waltzing-- and some of the actors are lip-synching the arias as sung by folks with bigger voices. But there is also a lot of spoken dialogue, so the actors get to establish their characters in their own voices. The trouble is that the characters are still the silly, exaggerated characters of an operetta, with chiming watches, comic hangovers, and huge plot-enhancing blind spots.

The most interesting character is of course Anton Walbrook's Dr. Falke, the Bat. As in The Red Shoes and La Ronde, Walbrook plays the man who keeps the whole thing going, the leader of the dance, but here he is euphoric, almost ecstatic. Falke is presented as a black-marketer who arranges parties for the higher-ups of the Four Powers occupying Vienna, and keeps them on good terms with each other; he exploits them, lives off them--and he would like to see them all go home. He is witty and views everything with cheerful irony, but he never stops enjoying himself for a moment, never goes down, only up, up, up.

Ludmilla Tcherina is a delightful French farce heroine, flirting only when absolutely necessary. Michael Redgrave gets to do some great swooping physical comedy (apparently he also did his own singing, but who can tell?). Mel Ferrer comes off well in his light role as the old boyfriend, as does Dennis Price in a smaller role whose main duty is to be recognizable for plot purposes. Anneliese Rothenberger is a reminder of more conventional stagings, where the singers act instead of having actors "sing."

I felt that the 1955 setting was a bit thin--were the 50's really THAT much about denying what had happened and "moving on"? Maybe they were--Pressburger and Powell were good at telling where the wind was blowing.

Though their 1940s output is unanimously celebrated by critics and audiences, the Powell/Pressburger collaborations of the 1950s are often forgotten or outright dismissed. I have not seen all of them, save for Gone to Earth and Oh... Rosalinda!! but I was surprised by how good both of them were. No, they're not on the same transcendent heights as the likes of The Red Shoes or The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (heck, precious few movies are), but they are good in their own right and still lovely to look at.

Oh... Rosalinda!! may be a bit of an acquired taste for some people. The aesthetic is very flat and artificial, stagey even, much like the more elaborate Tales of Hoffman but with apparently less of a budget. It's also a bedroom farce, so if you're not much for that kind of comedy, you may find it hard to get into the swing of things. I myself care little for such comedies, but I rather enjoyed this one, mainly due to the strength of the performers. Anton Walbrook is great as the black market dealer who manipulates everyone, showing a great penchant for comedy he rarely got to express in his English language projects. Ludmilla Tcherina is playful and sexy as the woman everyone wants. Mel Ferrer is a bit overdone, but he's not bad at all.

No great classic, but Oh... Rosalinda!! is worth at least one glance from Powell-Pressburger devotees.

Based on an operetta by Johan Strauss, Oh...Rosalinda!! Is a confection, a small delight of nothingness that flitters away from the mind as soon as it's done, but it's fun while it lasts. Reminding me of Lubitsch, this is Powell and Pressburger taking the formalism and theatrical influences of The Tales of Hoffmann and bringing them down a bit, going for more modest returns on more modest sets and with more modest emotions. I think the package ends up being a modest delight, a small concoction of music and some small dance dealing with masquerade, light revenge, and attempted infidelity that becomes fidelity.

Rosalinda (Ludmilla Tcherina) is married to the French Colonel Eisenstein (Michael Redgrave) in Cold War Vienna. Eisenstein played a trick on the local Dr. Falke (Anton Walbrook) by getting him drunk and putting him on a Soviet statue, causing a small controversy that reached Moscow newsreels. Of course, Dr. Falke actually recreated the event and brought photographers because his doctoral title is honorary only and he's just a man about town in his native city. He needed the publicity. However, the trick still irks him lightly, and Dr. Falke will have his revenge, and it involves getting the four-powers military tribunal to sentence him to several days in the barracks (effectively prison), making it worse by convincing him to go to a party that night instead of reporting on time, and involving Rosalinda. An extra wrinkle gets added with Rosalinda's old lover, the American Major Frank (Dennis Price) arrives in town and tries to use Eisenstein's time in jail to woo Rosalinda.

So, the whole situation is that Eisenstein is being convinced to go to the party of the Russian General Orlovsky (Anthony Quayle) because there will be pretty ladies, Rosalinda is taking Eisenstein's absence as an excuse to reignite her relationship with Frank. It's all about infidelity, but Falke is there to make things go right in his own underhanded and scheming way.

This is where the Lubitsch (and probably Wilder) comparisons come in. Falke starts the film as The Bat, being arrested and with his little masquerade mask, and his mission is to be this playful sprite causing chaos towards a harmonious end. This is technicolor Lubitsch ground, and it's fun. That's where I end up focusing for long stretches. There's not a whole lot going on. It's a series of excuses to go from one setpiece to the next filled with song and slightly naughty merriment. It ends up a largely plot-driven exercise, probably hindered by the machinations around Frank which feel so extraneous and not all that well integrated into everything else (he gets arrested by the four-powers police because they think he's Eisenstein even though he doesn't sound at all French and probably has identification papers, but he's talked into it by Rosalinda for reasons).

And that's where the charms lie. This is not a deep exercise in a look at rekindling love. It almost seems accidental at a certain point, but if Dr. Falke is a wayward sprite, there's room for him to have these sorts of extra influences outside of his direct control. This is probably me trying to fill in gaps with some head canon, but in a light and fluffy exercise of music and production design, it doesn't seem like a completely uncalled for reaction.

And I come away with it in similar ways that I came away with many of Lubitsch's by being unable to say more than, "Isn't this grand?" Well, not quite grand. It's fun. It's not as light on its feet as Lubitsch at his best. However, we do get Powell and Pressburger expertly filming in intentionally fake looking sets (painterly is the obvious direction) all while the actors get to have fun. There's precious little dancing (apparently a sticking point for contemporary critics, especially around Tcherina's lack of dancing) which is something of a surprise considering both The Tales of Hoffman and The Red Shoes, but it doesn't bother me too much. Well, honestly, the whole thing could have been more infectious with more dancing.

So, it's light, frothy, and a bit forgettable. It's about true love conquering, all while reveling in promises of infidelity. It shows that Powell and Pressburger had a definite vision of the perfect woman (Rosalinda goes redhead when she goes in disguise to the party).

I mean, this is a mostly forgotten entry in a mostly forgotten filmography, but for those who've enjoyed Powell's work on his best known films, this is ready for reappraisal. It's fun.