Soldato di cioccolata

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.