THE STUDENT PRINCE IN OLD HEIDELBERG (1927) B/W "silent" 105m dir: Ernst Lubitsch
w/Ramon Novarro, Norma Shearer, Jean Hersholt, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Phillipe De Lacey, Edgar Norton, Bobby Mack, Edward Norton, Otis Harlan, John S. Peters, Edythe Chapman, Lionel Belmore, Lincoln Steadman, George K. Arthur
"Silent" comedy-romance about a young prince (Novarro), who leaves the palace for the first time to attend a university. While there, he learns about the "common people" and falls in love with a barmaid (Shearer). This stylish and charming movie was the occasion of Lubitsch's first trip back to his native Germany (where he was a successful director before emigrating to the US in the early 1920s). The exteriors and backgrounds for THE STUDENT PRINCE were filmed on location.
From The Lubitsch Touch: A Critical Study by Herman G. Weinberg: "When asked what opportunities this old chestnut about a prince in love with a barmaid presented for the characteristic Lubitsch originality, he smiled, 'Well, for one thing, there won't be any duels in it.' 'What?' exclaimed his interviewer in surprise, 'A picture about old Heidelberg without student duels?' 'That's right, said Lubitsch. 'Who wants to compete with Douglas Fairbanks when it comes to duels?'
"What was the director of The Marriage Circle and Lady Windermere's Fan going to make out of the beery sentimentality of this weepy favorite? Lubitsch's production company (MGM) had the answer to that. Hadn't [director Erich von] Stroheim, two years before, turned the same trick with The Merry Widow with felicitous box-office results? Both were successful stage operettas, both had bittersweet librettos, both had catchy music that was world renowned, and each director had an individual style which, when wedded to these elements, almost insured a fresh approach and a popular success. MGM proved it was right both times.
"In The Student Prince," Lubitsch told an interviewer, I tried for simplicity. It's a tender, romantic story, and I treated it that way.'
"'Then it won't be anything like Forbidden Paradise, say.'
"'Not in the least! There I was above my characters, looking down on them, laughing at them. Here I'm on the same level with them, I'm one of them.'
"'A startlingly beautiful piece of cinema art,' wrote Donald Thompson in The Telegram. 'A thousand and one delightful touches on the part of the remarkable Mr. Lubitsch serve to make The Student Prince a joy,' beamed Wilella Waldorf in the New York Post. 'There never was a sweeter Kathi nor a more lovable old codger than the prince's tutor as played by Jean Hersholt,' extolled George Gerhard in another journal. 'But superimposed upon the stellar work of these two is the direction of Ernst Lubitsch, that German wizard of the screen. ... In almost every sequence one could sit back and marvel at his artistic touch, his manner of raising humdrum scenes to the point of imaginative flights.' 'Mr. Lubitsch, whose The Marriage Circle is the finest and richest comedy yet put into the films, has done with The Student Prince exactly as was right and as was expected of him,' said Quinn Martin in The World. Finally, from the Abou ben Adhem of film critics of the time, Richard Watts in The New York Herald Tribune, 'It captures the mood of tragic, sentimental love, of separated true lovers, and of a nostalgia for lost youth that is highly moving. ... The director has made his work so shrewd a fusing of sentiment and highbred comedy that the picture does for wistful romance what Stroheim's The Merry Widow did for that of a more earthy type. ... I predict it will be a considerable success.'
"Watts was right. The picture was a hit. ...
"One recalls the light satirical edge of the scenes of royal pomp and panoply as The Student Prince opens, which made one secretly pleased that Lubitsch wasn't giving up his franchise in this area even for a sentimental operetta. And when Katchen, the innkeeper's daughter and barmaid, bounces on the bed to show Prince Karl Heinrich how good the springs are, and the shy young prince blushes at what she innocently appears to be doing, we knew then that the director of Kiss Me Again and So This Is Paris was still there, 'cloven-hoof' and all, for all the 'love's old sweet song' of the scenario. But the picture is basically charged with sentiment, as a true love story should be, and in this respect has an affinity with the unhappiness of Stroheim's The Wedding March (Part Two), as when the prince's return to the capital, after his romance with Katchen and during his father's (the king's) illness, is accompanied by bleak rain, while in the now desolate Heidelberg fallen autumn leaves swirl in a wind as the lonely Katchen stares from her window. The prince's return to the empty beer garden, now bereft of laughter and song, and his last meeting with Katchen in the field, once a carpet of daisies during their short-lived summer romance, now withered and sere with autumn's chill --- all this has an almost tactile feeling. And there is the final scene of the lovelorn prince and his princess (whom we never see --- another Lubitsch touch, for she is nothing to him) in their nuptial carriage --- a marriage that is just another entry in the Almanach de Gotha and nothing more."