THE END!!!!!!

You too need to jazz up your lingerie me thinks.

It's not about the romance, it's about the sin!

A great movie. Beats The Love Parade, which I thought would be hard to do.

I admit part of me would have preferred if he ended up with Colette's character. But the ending didn't really spoil the movie for me because it was still pretty charming (especially the scene with the checkers board).

Another thing I liked about the ending is right to the end I didn't know who the lieutenant would end up with. In today's movies you usually can tell who will win out in the love triangle but Lubitsch really does keep you guessing. It was the same with Trouble in Paradise for me (although I slightly prefer that ending because I was more pleased with the outcome).

It was a bittersweet ending. I was happy for Anna but also sad for Franzi because she gave up her love.

"Let us be crooked, but never common."

I think that this might have to do with the fact that Lubitsch was a jew. In Christian culture, like in Platonism, sin is associated with earthy pleasures, and goodness with what goes beyond them (spirituality, ideas and so on). But for the Jewish culture, earthy pleasures are part of life, and they are as much as God's creation as anything (theoretically, in Christianism this is more or less so, but in the end, everything has to go through the filter of non-physicality).

Lubitsch was not very religious (although Hans Kräly told that he used to say a prayer every morning before the shooting started), but I think his view of life was very much jewish. Romance and sex are not separated in his films. Even when desire leads to infidelity, if it is not done in a conscious manner, he forgives his characters and in a way applauds them happily, for they are sincere humans.

Lubitsch never condemns a character for his weakneses, except in the case of a character who wants to get advantage of other's weakneses and/or is too dumb to see everything life has to enjoy by being sincere. Billy Wilder's view of weakneses is more tragic, more complex and, perhaps, more christian. In his films, everything we do has a serious consequence outside, and also inside: moral corruption is the result.

However, I agree that The Smiling Lieutenant's ending, although very charming, does not work on itself. This happens frequently in Lubitsch musicals: its characters are not that well defined, and the films work better as a series of ingenious vignettes than as solid storytelling. For instance, Chevalier's change of attitude towards Miriam Hopkins, telling of Lubitsch's psyche as it might be, is quite illogical. We have been made believe that he was in love with Claudette Colbert.

Nevertheless, everything is so light, and seems of so little consequence, that it is not such a letdown. Chevalier himself does not appear as a very human character, in the sense that he's not very particular, but a caricature. And his relationship with Colbert is not especially defined: one feels that he will obtain the same thing from Hopkins, even though she's a different woman. In a way, she has become Colbert.

Yeah, I didn't like the ending at all. All I could think of was this trope and how much it irritates me:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeAWhoreToGetYourMan

Peter, is your social worker in that horse?