Lua Nova

MGM scrapped the ridiculous plot of the 1928 Romberg-Hammerstein stage operetta and replaced it with an even more ridiculous one, with Russian lieutenant Lawrence Tibbett romancing Princess Grace Moore despite her engagement to nobleman Adolphe Menjou. It's the sort of movie where characters say things like, "The one attractive woman on this ship and she would be a princess!" And Moore isn't especially attractive; she's dowdy, looks oddly at the camera, and is got up in some genuinely bizarre MGM fashions. Her character is shrewish, too, so when Menjou dispatches Tibbett to some remote outpost to battle some menacing, vaguely Turkish insurgents, you really feel he's better off without her. An eternally suave and amusing Roland Young defuses some of the operetta silliness; but it's hard not to get the giggles when Tibbett, trying to rouse the troops, barks endless song cues -- "All right, can I have 20 brave men with me? Fifteen? How about 10?" -- before launching into "Stout-Hearted Men." The climactic battle is clumsily shot and unconvincingly run in fast motion, like a Mack Sennett comedy, and it's never really in doubt whether Tibbett will return to Moore in one piece (singing full-voice, of course, whatever his wounds). The ludicrous conventions that killed operetta are omnipresent. But the score's good, and the two opera-trained stars do give enthusiastically of themselves when called on to sing. That's what counts.