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  Wunderbar the emperor Waltz and A Foreign Affair I never knew the old Vienna with its Strauss music, glamour, and easy charm. I really got to know it in the classic period of the black market after the war. Vienna didn’t look any worse than Berlin—bombed out. —Graham Greene When Wilder returned to Hollywood from Europe in the fall of 1945, he turned his back on war-ravaged Vienna. Instead he decided to make a lush musical about pre–World War I Vienna, after the manner of the Waltz King, Johann Strauss (“The Blue Danube”), and Franz Lehar. Wilder remembered the Viennese operettas of Strauss and Lehar from his youth in Vienna. Furthermore, Wilder had collaborated with Lehar himself on a musical film in Berlin back in 1932, Es war einmal ein Walzer (Once There Was a Waltz). One of Strauss’s finest waltzes, “The Emperor Waltz,” would provide the title of Wilder’s present film and be featured in the movie’s score. Wilder was, of course, bracketed with Brackett, his writing partner, in the film colony, and not always to his advantage. Brackett, it was whispered in industry circles, “exercised a restraining, civilizing influence on the cynical , callous, morbid tendencies of Billy Wilder.”1 Yet The Emperor Waltz was to be a fluffy Viennese musical confection, a project that obviously appealed much more to the Austrian Wilder than to the New England Brackett. “I don’t suppose I ever understood it very well,” said Brackett.2 Wilder returned to Paramount in mid-September 1945. “After cutting . . . a thirty-minute documentary about the concentration camps,” he explained, he wanted to get those images out of his mind. During a conference with the studio brass one afternoon, an executive noted that the studio did not have a suitable vehicle for Bing Crosby. Wilder picked up on the Some LIke It WILder 0 idea. Speaking on Brackett’s behalf, as well as for himself—as he always did at these meetings—Wilder ventured, “Why don’t we just do a musical?”3 The Emperor Waltz (1948) At the time, making a picture with Crosby seemed like a good bet. Crosby had won an Academy Award for playing a priest in Going My Way, and his other recent pictures had been hits. In addition, Wilder had personally liked Crosby as a top vocalist ever since he had met him in Vienna in 1926, when Crosby was touring with Paul Whiteman’s band. Crosby was to play an American by the name of Virgil Smith, peddling phonographs in Austria. Joan Fontaine excelled in playing refined heroines. She had won plaudits for playing the title role in Jane Eyre (1944) opposite Orson Welles. She was to take the part of Countess Johanna Augusta in Wilder’s film. Richard Haydn, who specialized in playing elderly types twice his age, such as Professor Oddly in Ball of Fire, was called on to take over the part of the aging Emperor Franz Josef after Wilder decided that Oscar Karlweis, who had originally been cast, was not right for the part. The story that Wilder devised with Brackett was set at the beginning of the twentieth century in Vienna, when Wilder was himself a child; he clearly looked back on his boyhood and homeland with affection. The plot was derived from an actual incident: a Danish inventor had demonstrated a primitive talking machine to Emperor Franz Josef, who rejected it out of hand as a newfangled innovation.4 In the film, Virgil Smith endeavors to get the emperor to endorse his gramophone to spark European sales of his product . While visiting the imperial palace, Virgil’s fox terrier, Buttons, takes a fancy to the persnickety poodle of Countess Johanna Augusta, and Virgil, in turn, becomes enamored of Johanna. Wilder had been frustrated when he collaborated on movie musicals in his Berlin days, such as the one he worked on with Franz Lehar, because the musical numbers were merely appendages to the plot. He wanted each song in The Emperor Waltz to be an extension, not an interruption, of the plot. For example, the song “Friendly Mountains” in The Emperor Waltz expresses how dazzled Virgil is when he visits the Tyrolean Alps, where he has a rendezvous with Johanna. Wilder envisioned The Emperor Waltz as an homage to Ernst Lubitsch, who had directed some delightful musical films, like his version of Lehar’s Merry Widow (1934). When Wilder and Brackett finished the first draft of the screenplay...

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