Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

From my favorite movies..

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Lubitsch's last film - completed by an inept Preminger - is a remake of BRIDE OF THE REGIMENT _ a 1930 all two -strip Technicolor film, starring Walter Pidgeon, Vivienne Segal and Myrna Loy - which is now lost - although the Vitaphone disc soundtrack survives at UCLA.This was in turn derived from a stage musical entitled THE LADY IN ERMINE by Lonsdale and Wood, adapted from an operetta, DIE FRAU IM HERMELIN by Schanzer and Welisch.It drags badly and Grable is as inept as Fairbanks is fabulous, doing all the work here, full of life and vitality, taking the Lubitsch direction perfectly. It is tired Lubitsch and rather dull and boring during most of its length, although it perks up occasionally. Interesting more as an artifact than a film.

Watching That Lady In Ermine I was wondering what Betty Grable was doing in a project that seemed to be aimed for Marlene Dietrich to do. Someone over at 20th Century Fox may have decided one sex symbol is as good as another. Darryl F. Zanuck should have known better.Betty plays a 19th century Italian countess whose domain has been invaded by a troop of Hungarian Hussars captained by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Her ghostly ancestor whose portrait hangs in the palace hall along with the rest of her distinguished family tree, sees no small resemblance in Doug now and another invader some 300 years earlier whom she dealt with when armies failed.Besides that the current Betty has just been married to Cesar Romero and the invasion has come at a most inopportune moment, before things have been consummated. That's going to give anyone a bad attitude, I guarantee.Fresh, wholesome all American Betty is NOT the actress to do seductive and mysterious. Marlene Dietrich might have put this over, but with Betty it falls flatter than yesterday's presidential candidate. She and Fairbanks have no chemistry at all, though Doug is as charming as ever and someone I can watch in anything.Frederick Hollander and Leo Robin wrote the score for this film and This Is The Moment got an Oscar nomination for Best Song. That Lady In Ermine's one chance for Oscar glory fell to Buttons And Bows.Ernest Lubitsch died midway during the film and Otto Preminger finished That Lady In Ermine. I can't believe Lubitsch had Grable in mind for the lead here. Neither will you if you see That Lady In Ermine.

Lubitsch's last production but not his least interesting film. Somehow largely ignored by critics as he couldn't finish it himself and as the movie wasn't co-signed by Preminger who he did most of the staging... A very strange mix of musical (a remembrance of The Merry Widow ?)and classic Lubitsch touch sentimentalism (an impossible love-story like Cluny Brown)yet a very clever and intelligent one yet not to be understood as some nostalgia of some lost world but rather a testament on eternal feelings prevailing on the foolishness of mankind and especially men in times of war with a "moral" lesson still true today as it was in 1948. Billy wilder as an answer to Preminger who grieved at Lubitsch's funerals about having lost a great man replied that we still had his films and that sums it all up about that Lady in Ermine...

In 1948 this was my all-time favorite movie. Betty Grable's costumes were so ravishing that I wanted to grow up to be her and dress like that. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., was irresistible as the dashing Hungarian officer. Silly and fluffy as this movie might appear at first, when I was eight years old it seemed to me to say something important about relations between men and women. I saw it again the other day; I was surprised to find that it still did.