With Stafford Cripps currently Chancellor of the Exchequor audiences needed a break from rationing and austerity and lapped this nonsense up in 1950. But despite the trappings of Technicolor and occasional sunlit Austrian locations this tinny big screen version of Ivor Novello's long-running West End hit of 1939 (originally directed on stage by Leontine Sagan) feels drab and cheap, with many of the exteriors obviously shot in the studio.
Dennis Price is stiff and charmless in lederhosen in the romantic lead as (in Bosley Crowther's words) a "minor-league Johann Strauss", played originally by Novello himself. (In the original he was also Jewish and the action reached the Anschluss, whereas this version ends rather abruptly in 1926.)
(His starchy romantic rival for the hand of prima donna Maria Zeitler is ironically played by Anthony Nicholls, who with Price ten years later found himself reluctantly on Derren Nesbitt's mailing list in 'Victim'.)
Remarkably, the hero is permitted to father a child while remaining unmarried; though not, sadly, by Patricia Dainton, who, despite being delightfully bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as juvenile second female lead Grete, is given dismayingly short shrift throughout.
Dennis Price is stiff and charmless in lederhosen in the romantic lead as (in Bosley Crowther's words) a "minor-league Johann Strauss", played originally by Novello himself. (In the original he was also Jewish and the action reached the Anschluss, whereas this version ends rather abruptly in 1926.)
(His starchy romantic rival for the hand of prima donna Maria Zeitler is ironically played by Anthony Nicholls, who with Price ten years later found himself reluctantly on Derren Nesbitt's mailing list in 'Victim'.)
Remarkably, the hero is permitted to father a child while remaining unmarried; though not, sadly, by Patricia Dainton, who, despite being delightfully bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as juvenile second female lead Grete, is given dismayingly short shrift throughout.