Writer-director Billy Wilder is usually regarded as the maker of sophisticated fare, whether dark examinations of human frailty like Double Indemnity or racy comedies like Some Like It Hot. But he occasionally turned his attention to lighter material like this piece of fluff from 1948, which he co-wrote with Charles Brackett: it tries to emulate the famous “Lubitsch touch,” but comes off as a heavy-handed homage to Wilder’s mentor and idol.
Set at the turn of the century in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the supposedly wacky story centers on Virgil Smith (Bing Crosby), an American salesman who has come to the Viennese court to secure an endorsement by the Emperor of the great new invention he is hawking in Europe—the gramophone.
At the palace, Virgil’s cute little mutt Buttons is injured in an altercation with Scheherazade, a French poodle owned by Countess Johanna (Joan Fontaine), who has just arranged to pair her pet with the ruler’s beloved dog for breeding purposes. Unhappily, the encounter with Buttons traumatizes Scheherazade, and a goofy doctor (Sig Ruman) advises that only a rapprochement with Buttons will cure her.
But while Virgil and Johanna, thrown together, get close, the two canines get closer still, and troubles arise when the American seeks to marry the countess—a match far below her station—and Scheherazade gives birth to a litter sired by Buttons. The first problem is solved when the genial Emperor agrees to supply Virgil with the endorsement he seeks in return for giving up Johanna. But the second horrifies Smith—the puppies are to be drowned. Naturally, he rescues them, accusing their would-be murderers of not thinking them “pure enough” to live. That veiled reference to the Holocaust, along with the status-based dismissal of the marriage (which is ultimately overcome, of course), is typical of Wilder’s penchant for mixing the sour with the sweet; it undermines the operetta-like portrait of Austro-Hungarian society drawn elsewhere in the film, with its dancing peasant farmers, waltzing aristocrats, and walks through the Tyrolian Alps.
The repeated use of the Austrian national anthem (the melody of “Deutschland über Alles”) might also have raised some eyebrows in 1948. But these touches are too little to save the movie from seeming a piece of period kitsch, especially since Crosby, with his forties mannerisms, seems as out of place as he intentionally would in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court the following year, and there is little chemistry between him and the statuesque Fontaine; his songs are mediocre, too. Despite a fine transfer that does its creamy Technicolor images proud, The Emperor Waltz seems destined to remain a footnote in the Wilder canon.
The bonus features are minimal: an audio commentary by film historian Joseph McBride, and a brief clip of Wilder discussing the making of the film (which he dismisses as a failure) with Volker Schlõndorff. Optional.