Capriccio

This film is a lost musical parody treasure that screams to be rediscovered. Everything about this film including the humorous songs and dance numbers rivals (I would say surpasses) the best of any Hollywood equivalent of that era. The musical and dance numbers are both wonderful and weird -- There's a very strange number in which a mother sings a song about the supposed rape of her daughter in order to compromise Harvey's character (whom she thinks is a young duke) into marriage. She sings the song pleasantly and jauntily trills the word “vergewaltigt” (rape) over and over.

Lilian Harvey is in top form-and the film is whimsical, beautifully decorated and somewhat weird-at one point Harvey sings an entire song about her love affairs with women, dressed in male drag to a group of enrapt ladies of the night in a salon. The pacing is great, and Viktor Staal is the perfect rogue leading man for Harvey. It's a pity they were not paired again.

Note the scene at Ale Inn, where Madelon, playing Don Juan, is now in drag and is having a sword fight with the customers. About four customers are white, one is black. This is supposed to take place in France during the Napoleonic period, so I don’t think there were any blacks around there at that time. I guess national-socialists embraced DEI in the movies way earlier than the USA.