The Chocolate Soldier

This is one of those forgotten musical comedies from the vaults that is well worth taking the time to sit back and watch. The set-up for the plot takes a little more time than it should, but once the deceptions begin, the banter and the inter-play between Nelson Eddy and Rise Stevens carry the show. Nelson Eddy is in fine voice, and Rise Stevens' sparklingly burnished vocal range and comedic talent shouldn't be missed. 'The Chocolate Soldier' is well-filmed and crisply edited, presented in glorious black and white. The costumes alone should have merited a Technicolor production.

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.

Nelson Eddy was always considered a dull non-actor with a nice voice, no histrionic match for his usual co-star Jeanette MacDonald (who became increasingly coy and diva-ish with every passing movie). Here, opposite Rise Stevens in a musical updating of Molnar's "The Guardsman," he gets to exercise some hitherto unknown comic energy, and he's quite good-- not up to Alfred Lunt, perhaps, who played the role in MGM's 1931 non-musical version, but pleasingly hammy and with genuine comic timing. Stevens has a nice personality and, of course, a lovely Met soprano, but she's unflatteringly photographed, and she's playing a not very likable character. With minor roles given to Nigel Bruce and Florence Bates, Eddy and Stevens are pretty much the whole show, and they navigate the Oscar Straus melodies (and a few others) and worn marital-discord plot expertly. Made during the Hays Code years, it's less spicy than the original -- we're never in doubt as to whether the wife realizes her husband's exploits or not -- and takes place in a mittel-European never-never-land that never, never intrudes on reality. Once you get used to all the artifice and MGM overproduction, it's quite enjoyable. And it suggests Eddy may have had a productive career in comedy.

THE CHOCOLATE SOLDIER is a musical based on the famous old Molnar play THE GUARDSMAN, filmed by the Lunts back in 1931, in which an actor (Nelson Eddy) tests the fidelity of his actress wife (Rise Stevens) by disguising himself as a Russian prince and trying to seduce her while her `husband' is out of town. He succeeds, to his chagrin. The handsome and amiable but often bland Eddy is almost unrecognizable as the fiery and passionate Russian, and his performance is a comic revelation, accent and all (favorite lines: `My fillings are runnink avay vith me' and `Like sheeps that pass out in the night'). Unfortunately, a good deal of the original naughtiness is missing: the Production Code of 1941 required that the wife be aware of her husband's masquerade from the beginning. In the original play she claims she knew it was him all along---but did she? We're not sure!

Dreadful choreography in the musical numbers, but beautiful Oscar Strauss music performed masterfully by Eddy and Rise Stevens, plus `Evening Star' from TANNHAUSER sung gorgeously by Eddy and `My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice' from SAMSON AND DELILAH by Stevens. Even though Stevens has the superior voice, one can't help wishing that Jeanette MacDonald, with her considerable comic gifts, had been available for the part!

A mix of the operetta The Chocolate Soldier and the play The Guardsman, this is one for those of us with incurably romantic hearts ... Eddy is as reliable as ever (The Song of the Flea and Sympathy especially good) and Rise Stevens in her debut film is pretty, witty and charming, as well as being in fabulous voice. One for rainy winter afternoons.