The Chocolate Soldier

After their seventh teaming in Bittersweet did not fare as well in the box office the previous year, MGM decided to split Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald for their next films. Nelson was given his choice of leading lady and he picked Rise Stevens of the Metropolitan Opera.

If nothing else, Louis B. Mayer prided himself on bringing class to the cinema and he never met a diva he didn't want to sign for MGM. Eddy, who didn't really get along with Mayer and was soon to leave MGM after a spat with him, I think knew just how much it would cost to sign someone from the outside and he made Mayer spend the dough.

Rise Stevens had appeared with him on radio so Nelson's motives weren't completely to hurt Mayer financially. They worked well together here and maybe they could have been a screen team themselves. Rise Stevens had a good gift for comedy, very much like that other singer/actress Irene Dunne. But after The Chocolate Soldier and an appearance in Going My Way with Bing Crosby, she left the silver screen.

Like the Eddy/MacDonald feature Sweethearts this utilizes the music, but not the plot. Like Sweethearts the leads are appearing on stage in The Chocolate Soldier, but it's a backstage story for the plot. And the plot used is The Guardsman which MGM owned the rights to, having filmed it in 1931 with Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne.

Eddy and Stevens look so good and sing so beautifully on stage, but that doesn't account for Eddy's all consuming jealousy over his wife. His Othello act doesn't even need an Iago for a boost, he's creating all kinds of imaginary lovers for Stevens. Finally he decides to put her to the test, playing a phony Russian opera singer with beard and Cossack costume. Stevens however is up to the challenge and it's a pretty funny film that follows.

The two leads have some nice duets together, particularly the My Hero duet from Oscar Straus's Chocolate Soldier. But the big hits of this film are Moussorgsky's Song of the Flea and another song While My Lady Sleeps written by Bronislau Kaper and Gus Kahn. Both were standard items in Nelson Eddy concerts. Eddy recorded both, however the version I have of the Song of the Flea is in English and in The Chocolate Soldier, Nelson sings it in the original Russian.

It was a good teaming Eddy and Stevens and since right after this Jeanette and Nelson would be doing their last film together, I Married an Angel, it's unfortunate Stevens and Eddy did not do a few more films together themselves.

Fearing that Nelson and Jeanette had hit their last high note at the box office, Louis B teamed Nelson with Rise Stevens in "The Chocolate Soldier" in 1941. The two make a lovely team, both good-looking with beautiful operatic voices. The plot? Well, this married couple star together on stage. The husband (Eddy) thinks the wife (Stevens) is losing interest, so he disguises himself as another man and romances her.

It takes a long time, but the music is beautiful, including "My Hero," "Mon coeur" from Samson and Delilah, "Evening Star" from Tannhauser (in English - I'm guessing in 1941, no one wanted to hear German), and many others. A friend of mine worked for Stevens, and she would occasionally comment that she was quite a looker in her day, to which my friend would reply, "Yeah, Miss Stevens, you were all right." She was a little more than that, at a time when opera singers who had true glamor was rarer than it is today.

Eddy and MacDonald were reteamed for one more film; the world had changed too much for their operatic fantasies. When Mario Lanza starred in films that used opera ten years later, he played, among other things, a truck driver and a soldier. It's too bad; Stevens and Eddy and MacDonald and Eddy both made beautiful teams.

This is one of those forgotten musical comedies from the vaults that is well worth taking the time to sit back and watch. The set-up for the plot takes a little more time than it should, but once the deceptions begin, the banter and the inter-play between Nelson Eddy and Rise Stevens carry the show. Nelson Eddy is in fine voice, and Rise Stevens' sparklingly burnished vocal range and comedic talent shouldn't be missed. 'The Chocolate Soldier' is well-filmed and crisply edited, presented in glorious black and white. The costumes alone should have merited a Technicolor production.

Those who actually KNOW Oscar Straus's original operetta will have a great time watching how MGM turned somersaults using it as the show-within-a-show that Nelson Eddy and Risë Stevens (who would later record the original operetta for RCA) are performing "on stage" in this musical film trading on the famous show's title when they couldn't get the rights to film the full show.

The history of the original operetta is fairly well known: Straus wanted to adapt one of G.B. Shaw's earliest and arguably funniest plays, ARMS AND THE MAN to the operetta stage. Shaw was amenable but doubted the result would work and didn't want to undercut the ongoing royalty stream of one of his most successful plays (it is regularly performed to this day).

In compromise, Shaw demanded a number of conditions: 1) they WOULD use his basic plot (in fact the authors and Stanislaus Strange in his English language translation shoehorned most of Shaw's interpersonal comedy into the first and third acts of their operetta but omitted almost entirely the Fabian class comedy Shaw held dear to his heart), 2) they would not use any of the original character names or a single actual LINE of his dialogue, 3) all programs for productions in England had to carry the producers apologies to Shaw "for this unauthorized PARODY of one of his plays." 4) In return for these concessions, Shaw would decline ANY royalties for the operetta (but reserved the right to hate the result - which he did - probably at least in part as a result of the fortune he had declined on principle). Straus and company happily accepted the deal.

As Shaw expected, the operetta left out most of his best and funniest ideas; to his great surprise, it retained ENOUGH and had music GOOD enough that it was an enormous success anyway.

In 1940, when MGM wanted to continue their series of successful operetta films with Nelson Eddy, they found they had to approach the still very active Shaw - who had won an Oscar for Best Screenplay just two years before for his adaptation of his own play, PYGMALION. The great man was willing to be persuaded but unenthusiastic. He really didn't like the bowdlerization of one of his best perennial plays.

MGM had hoped/expected to snap up the rights to the old show on the cheap, but Shaw was not to be shortchanged. No deal could be struck on terms as cheap as MGM wanted. Still, MGM HAD the rights to the music and lyrics and the famous title so they went ahead anyway.

Technically they used Molnar's play THE GUARDSMAN as the basis for their film (it's really a generic but funny "jealous husband tests wife's fidelity with a masquerade she sees through" tale that's as old as the hills and Lubitch did it better in the 30's), but they didn't bother trying to adapt it to the old score.

Instead, they justified the TITLE and score they had bought by having the leads fairly obviously performing the operetta on stage between the off-stage comedy scenes (the credits in the opening "crawl" are among the most bizarre you will see anywhere). They just didn't show the plot scenes from the operetta and near the end rather outrageously had Eddy's character play the Second Act Finale from the operetta on the Act I set and in a brand new costume to make an offstage point - as if the audience in the theatre in the film wouldn't notice (watch the reactions of the delightful Nigel Bruce, tossed in as the befuddled best friend/observer).

MGM might as well have done DIE FLEDERMAUS for the same basic story and even better music, but what they got was and remains good fun - and Eddy wasn't ever up to a ...FLEDERMAUS in vocal or acting ability. Risë Stevens, a more down to earth actress than the bubbly MacDonald who usually left Eddy in the dust (and with a singing voice every bit as good), proved to be a solid, believable acting partner for him and (together with a relatively solid comedy book) makes Eddy seem to give one of his best performances on screen.

It's our loss that the declining popularity of Eddy and the quality of his vehicles deprived us of more pairings with Stevens who was so perfect for him. MacDonald was back for I MARRIED AN ANGEL (1942), he really didn't have a leading lady for the Claude Rains PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1943) or KNICKERBOCKER HOLIDAY (1944) and then, except for NORTHWEST OUTPOST (1947), it was all but over.

Now that both are in the public domain, it would be wonderful to get actual movies of ARMS AND THE MAN (the original 1932 British film has not been seen in years) and the *real* CHOCOLATE SOLDIER (there was a 1915 silent film of the 1909 operetta co-directed by the American translator) with the Stanislaus Strange libretto out of Shaw, but until they are appear, this hybrid comedy with healthy glimpses of an over produced version of the original is good fun.

Nelson Eddy and Rise Stevens star in an amusing film about a jealous husband, and his suspicions of his wife's infidelity. Nelson plays a dual role as the insecure husband and the Russian singer he impersonates to test his wife's loyalty. Rise is delicious as the teasing wife who exploits his doubts unmercifully. Nelson plays the Russian in a broad and sardonic manner which seems to prove again that he is more at ease and sure of himself in films without his usual costar and RL love interest. Nelson and Rise are in excellent voice. A couple of dances without the two leads could easily be cut. Neither approaches the humor of Nelson, nervously biting his nails, as he contemplates his insecurities.