The Cinematheque

“Underrated … [Lubitsch] livens things up with rhymed dialogue and direct addresses to the audience, not to mention an opening evocation of marital bliss as humorously suggestive as anything in the pre-Code canon.”

Geoffrey O’Brien, New York Review of Books

The musicals that Ernst Lubitsch made with major stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald—five in total—might have once looked like the wave of the future, a key link between the operetta and the popular songbook-incorporating film musicals to follow. Today, they’re a sui generis cycle of heavy entendre, light amorality, and romantic competition, less widely seen than his later comedies but essential to any full consideration of the director. One Hour with You might be the most formally audacious of the pack. A rare tinted talkie, it includes scenes delivered in couplets and audience-complicit asides that shatter the fourth wall. Lubitsch, in returning to the plot of his silent The Marriage Circle, saw a way to clarify and amplify a very simple set-up: happy couple Andre (Chevalier) and Colette (MacDonald) are deeply attracted to each other, and seriously committed to the idea that a marriage license needn’t negate the thrill of an affair or two.

“One of Ernst Lubitsch’s most effervescent and sophisticated comedies … A beguiling mixture of song, dance, and comedic mastery.” Wheeler Winston Dixon, Senses of Cinema

The October 19 screening of One Hour with You will be introduced by Devan Scott.