Episode Details

This podcast focuses on the Eclipse Series, box set editions of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed films recently revived by the Criterion Collection. Hosts David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett give an overview of each set and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this first of two episodes covering the recently reissued Blu-ray edition of Eclipse Series 8: Lubitsch Musicals, David and Trevor are joined by guest William Remmers to discuss two films: The Love Parade, starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, and Monte Carlo, also featuring Jeanette MacDonald, with Jack Buchanan.

About the films:

Renowned as a silent-film pioneer and the man who refined Hollywood comedy with such masterpieces as Trouble in Paradise, The Shop Around the Corner, and To Be or Not to Be, Ernst Lubitsch also had another claim to fame: he helped invent the modern movie musical. With the advent of sound, and with audiences clamoring for “talkies,” Lubitsch combined his love of European operettas and his mastery of cinema to develop this entirely new genre. These elegant, bawdy films, made before strict enforcement of the moralizing Production Code, feature some of the greatest stars of early Hollywood (Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, Claudette Colbert, Miriam Hopkins), as well as that elusive style of comedy that would thereafter be known as “the Lubitsch touch.”

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