Plot
The movie stars Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, Miriam Hopkins, Charles Ruggles and George Barbier. It is a romantic comedy concerning the love of a Princess for a soldier, and the love of the soldier for another woman. The Lieutenant (Chevalier) while standing in formation before a parade honoring the visiting royal family of Flausenthurm takes an opportunity to smile at his girlfriend in the crowd.
Unfortunately the smile is intercepted by the Princess of Flausenthurm, and an international incident is narrowly avoided by having them marry. The Lieutenant sneaks away from his bride to wander the streets of Flausenthurm and discovers his girlfriend Franzi (Colbert). The princess receives notice of this and decides to confront Franzi. After the initial confrontation, Franzi sees that the princess is in fact deeply in love with the lieutenant, and decides to save the marriage by giving the princess a makeover ("Jazz up your lingerie!") The results are a complete success as the Lieutenant follows his satin-clad, cigarette-puffing bride into the bedroom and closes the door — only to open it and give the audience a last song and a suggestive wink.
Read more about this topic: The Smiling Lieutenant
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
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