Isn't it great when you see something on film that you've never seen before and makes you go 'Wow!' And isn't it even greater when that thing appears in a film that is almost one hundred years old? Well, in Old Heidelberg that happens - a couple falling in love lie on a meadow full of flowers - and all the flowers start trembling!
Lubitsch's film is full of wonderful visual humour and brilliant orchestration of groups of people.
Heir apparent Philippe de Lacy comes to stay with King Gustav von Seyferrtitz. Enjoys a dull life until, grown up to be Ramon Novarro, he meets wonderful professor Jean Hersholt who has come to educate him. Hersholt is fabulous, kept making me think of a sort of version of Dr Dreyfuss in The Apartment (which knowing Billy could well have been a deliberate allusion).
In the town of the title the young Prince experiences the camaraderie of fellow students, beer drinking and falling in love, with Norma Shearer. Loved the moment they are being rowed, start kissing, and when we cut back to the rower, he is discreetly facing the other way round! Also the scene in which they realise they are sitting on either side of a wall.
And it doesn't have the fairy tale ending you're expecting. Which frankly was a really big surprise.
I watched TCM's presentation with an orchestral Carl Davis score, which made me think in an odd way of watching an opera with no singing. The 'MGM Story' says it was a major hit. Shearer married Irving Thalberg after filming concluded.
John Mescall photographed it. It's a shame a better print doesn't (seem to) exist.
Lubitsch had been in the USA since 1922's The Eyes of the Mummy. Early successes had been Rosita, The Marriage Circle, So This Is Paris, Lady Windermere's Fan and Forbidden Paradise. (Actually not sure if that last one was a hit. Need to read a Lubitsch biography.)
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