SYNOPSIS: American salesman attempts to introduce phonographs into Austria.NOTES: Locations in Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies. The film was shot from June through September 1946. Nominated for prestigious Hollywood awards for Scoring of a Musical Picture (Victor Young) (lost to Easter Parade), and Color Costume Design (lost to Joan of Arc). Domestic rental gross exceeded $4 million, which made it Paramount's number two (after The Road to Rio) boxoffice attraction of 1947-48. (Or if you want to take the calendar year 1948, the movie still came in second, but this time after The Paleface). Second to Road to Rio as Paramount's top-grossing Australian release of 1948. Bing Crosby, Best Actor of 1948 - Photoplay Gold Medal Award.COMMENT: Although some critics might regard this as a minor Billy Wilder exercise, it is in fact every bit as entertaining - perhaps more so - than such highly regarded Wilder comedies as A Foreign Affair and Some Like It Hot. Moreover it is sumptuously set and photographed, ingratiatingly acted, with Bing in fine voice, and Strauss music to boot. Crosby and Fontaine make particularly engaging principals and are well served by an outstanding support cast led by Richard Haydn, superbly raspy (and excellently made up) as Franz Joseph, and Roland Culver as an opportunistic if blue-blooded wastrel. Nice to see Sig Rumann and Lucile Watson (though we have never been able to spot Doris Dowling). Bert Prival is outstanding in an unexpectedly funny bit as the chauffeur who forsakes his staidness to slide down the banisters. Wilder's puckishly bizarre sense of humor is always in evidence, leading up to a frighteningly suspenseful climax in which the His Master's Voice pups are rescued from the evil Culver and Rumann. In all, doubtless due to Brackett's influence and contribution, Wilder has balanced the movie particularly well between farce and fantasy, romance and risibility, comic cut-ups and more realistic characterization, songs and suspense. The traditions of musical comedy are integrated with those of the comedy of manners. Both are not only exploited to the full, but gently lampooned.

The Emperor's (Richard Haydn) dog is betrothed to Johanna's (Joan Fontaine) dog. However, when Virgil (Bing Crosby) arrives in town to sell a gramaphone record player to the Emperor, his dog is attacked by Johanna's dog. After a revenge attack where Virgil is banished from town, a psychoanalyst insists that Johanna's dog must confront Virgil's dog so that she can overcome her doggy fears. This is arranged and the dogs fall in love. So do Virgil and Johanna. The rest of the film passes by with romance and at the end, Johanna's dog gives birth. But who is the father.......? The dog story is the very weak vehicle that is used to try and create a story between humans. Its a terrible storyline. There are 3 main musical pieces all of which are rubbish - bad songs and dreadful choreography. Its just an extremely boring film - Bing has too many words in each sentence and delivers them in an almost shouty, irritating manner. Its not funny............ EVER..........but its meant to be. Bing and Joan have done much better than this.

This is not a great Billy Wilder film, but any film he's involved in is worth looking at. Like Orson Welles, even when he's below par in his work he's ahead of the pack. Here Wilder is going back to his roots - he came from Austria, and just left it before the Nazi seized control (I think two aunts of his died in concentration camps). Wilder knew what the highbound, tradition controlled court and government of Austria Hungary was like, with it's unofficial racism towards Jews and Slavs. Only Hungarians (by force) got equal treatment to the Austrians in the government and army. If Jews did well in the professions or business they were hated for it. Only Erich von Stroheim would have had a similar idea of the truth, but he looked elsewhere at the sordidness of the court - at it's sexual peccadillos. But the film is not successful in capturing that image. It comes closest when Richard Haydn (as the old Emperor Franz Joseph - possibly his best straight acting job/though his performance as a sadistic nobleman in FOREVER AMBER is close to it)tells Bing Crosby why the marriage between him and Joan Fontaine would fail. Fontaine would soon be pining for those fine aristocratic experiences and events that she would never be able to go back to once she married a commoner. Haydn compares aristocrats to snails - serene and haughty in their little shells, but remove them from their shells and they die. It may be wrong here (the movie ends with Crosby and Fontaine united), but in reality it hasn't always worked. Look at the tradition bound Windsor family and their marriage fiascos.Oddly enough, just as Wilder failed in his attempt to make a film about the Austro-Hungarian Empire Max Ophuls made the classic Viennese romance of that period - A LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN, starring Fontaine and Louis Jordan. It was not on the scale of THE EMPEROR WALTZ, but it is better remembered and enjoyed, and gave Fontaine a memorably tragic character. If one wants to get a glimmer of the zeitgeist of old Wien see the Ophuls movie. And if not that see a British film starring Lili Palmer, BEWARE OF PITY, which also captures the neurosis of the upper classes in that age. As for THE EMPEROR WALTZ, watch it for Haydn's fine performance, Crosby's singing and comic moments (when he turns a phonograph into a 19th Century berry juicer, which is a lovely little scene), and Roland Culver's social plotting. You'll find these all quite enough to enjoy the movie.

"The Emperor Waltz" is an underrated jewel, a true hidden treasure by the great Billy Wilder. The basic idea of the movie is authentic comic genius, Wilder's trade-mark superb wit: two parallel funny love stories, a canine one, of a dog with a blitch, and a human one, of the straightforward American guy Virgil (Bing Crosby) with the haughty Austrian Countess Johanna Augusta Franziska (Joan Fontaine), the respective masters of the pets.Virgil is a commercial traveller: his stubborn attempts to sell gramophones to (no less a person than) the Emperor Franz-Josef are irresistibly comic. And then the Countess' blitch is the predestined partner of the Emperor's dog, and so she needs to be treated with extreme care (including sessions of psychoanalysis): all the hopes of the over-noble but impoverished family of the Holena von Shwartzemberg-Shwartzemberg lie in her paws... But it's all too funny to be described: see the movie and enjoy yourself.The funny, gently mocking reconstruction of the Austrian Court and of its rituals at the beginning of the 20th century is stunning. The delightful subtleties are uncountable: see the gentry play lawn-tennis, and the footmen in white gloves who present the tennis-balls on a silver tray...All the actors make an excellent job, and there are no words to praise enough Richard Haydn as Emperor Franz-Josef. The cinematography, in bright, cheerful colors, is accurate and evocative. The costumes and the locations are magnificent. The film was intended to be a musical: however, we find in it just a pair of nice songs and a rather short ballet. I consider it a further merit of the movie: I'm not much fond of musicals.I highly recommend "The Emperor Waltz", a praiseworthy issue of Wilder's magic wit and talent.