Plot
The opening shot of Naughty Marietta is of a trilling lark on a slender finger. A voice echoes the bird’s song, and the camera pulls back to reveal the Princess Marie de Namour de la Bonfain (Jeanette) in a pet shop. She has slipped away from the palace to purchase some songbirds and to visit her old singing teacher nearby. Bringing a big-eyed puppy as a gift, she finds Herr Schuman (Joseph Cawthorn, the doctor in Love Me Tonight) hard at work. He is trying to write down the mysterious melody of the bells from the nearby church. Just as Marie starts to help him, they are interrupted by the pranks of her former fellow students. Together, they all swirl up the stairs from floor to floor, singing the spirited “Chansonette” as the little spaniel clambers determinedly after them.
Back at the palace, things are far from gay. Marie’s doltish fiancé, Don Carlos (Walter Kingsford), has arrived with his three cadaverous sisters, bearing a gift of wedding clothes—all black. Marie’s ominous uncle (Douglass Dumbrille) orders her to be nice to Don Carlos, but she knows the marriage has been arranged only to make her accessible to the lecherous Louis XV. The alternative is prison and possibly death. In despair, she picks out the notes of the unfinished song on the piano.
She is interrupted by a serving girl, Marietta (Helen Shipman), who has come to say goodbye. Marietta is too poor to marry her Giovanni, so she is going to the New World as a Casquette Girl with a dowry from the King. There she will marry a trapper or planter and begin a new life.
A new life! Princess Marie decides to change places with Marietta. She gives the girl a dowry so she can marry her sweetheart. As a final gesture, Marie throws open the doors of her aviary, letting the birds fly free.
The king’s messengers are searching the countryside for her, but the new Marietta is nearly unrecognizable among the raw-boned brides. In a simple homespun dress, she crosses her eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses and distorts her face by stuffing her mouth with bread, chewing elaborately. When a suspicious sentry questions her, she points out a reeling drunk on the dock (silent comic Billy Dooley) as her “brother.” She waves him such a tearful farewell that he decides to go with her. Fortunately, he and the ship sway in different directions. As the ship prepares to sail, a dockside troubadour (Charles Bruins) sings the mocking love song of “Antoinette and Anatole.” Amidst the tears of the old people and children left behind, the ship pulls out into the harbor, taking the young girls to an unknown fate. Their voices rise in the moving “Prayer” (based on a Victor Herbert piano piece).
Off the coast of Louisiana, the girls discuss what kinds of husbands they hope for, but Marietta is hard at work on her song. “I’m not going to marry,” she tells them. She comforts the timid Julie (Cecilia Parker) when the other girls tease her and tells Julie she will find a fine young man in the New World. “But what about you, Marietta? Don’t you want a fine young man?”
They are interrupted by pirates who kill the crew and cart the girls off to their camp in the bayou. Facing death or worse at any moment, the girls hear a distant song. It is Captain Dick Warrington (Nelson) and his scouts!
They come “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp”-ing out of the woods and demolish the pirates. The girls take quite a liking to their colorful rescuers, but Dick Warrington assures them they will be delivered untouched to New Orleans. Marietta instantly dislikes the brash captain, and he, in turn, resents her superior airs.
The mercenary scout (Nelson) rescues the haughty princess in disguise (Jeanette) from pirates. (Celia Parker, center.)
Around the campfire, Dick charms the girls with his rich baritone rendition of “The Owl and the Bobcat.” Marietta pretends disinterest. Dick can’t understand what brought such an attractive girl to the wilderness to seek a husband. “Surely nothing short of a wooden leg.”
He takes advantage of the moonlight to sing the lushly romantic “’Neath the Southern Moon.” Marietta is not impressed. She snaps her fingers in his face and walks off disdainfully—right into a tree.
In New Orleans, the Casquette Girls are welcomed enthusiastically by the entire population, led by the Governor (Frank Morgan in his first role without a mustache since 1928) and his haughty wife (Elsa Lanchester). Soon the girls are promenading in the garden of a nearby convent, interviewing prospective husbands. “Can I have a blonde, mother?” “‘May I have a blonde,’ son.”
Dick and the Governor are enjoying the sight of all these pretty girls when a disturbance erupts. Marietta is refusing several very persistent young men. The Governor reminds her of her contract, but she insists it was “lies, all lies.” Certain that he has seen her somewhere before, the Governor reads her contract in search of the lies. Marietta agrees to the truth of each statement—her age, health, hometown—until he reaches “is of excellent character, entirely above reproach.”
“That’s it!” she cries, as Dick eyes her in disbelief. “Surely,” she asks, lowering her eyes, “you have a place in New Orleans for someone who doesn’t wish to marry but who likes to be charming...”
Amidst his wife’s splutters of rage, the Governor orders the gendarmes to take Marietta away and “find her a home somewhere.” His wife eyes him coldly. “And you thought you knew her.”
She can’t pay her rent—
Dick again rescues Marietta, this time from the gendarmes, who hope she plans to charm them. He finds her a place to live in the Bohemian quarter and invites himself to dinner. “I never cooked in my life,” she tells him, “and I’d die before I cooked you a radish.”
“You don’t cook radishes,” he replies, “you eat them alive.” Marietta is just about to throw Dick out when a group of singers from Rudolpho’s Marionette Theatre come by the balcony window. Dick loves to be sung to, and chides Marietta for not being as agreeable and talented as the troupe’s dark-eyed soprano. Marietta gleefully eclipses the lady with a spirited rendition of “The Italian Street Song,” giving an extra emphasis to the “Ah-ha-ha” refrain for Dick’s benefit.
Several gentlemen who have followed Marietta from the convent arrive with something less than marriage on their minds. Dick agrees with their declaration that Marietta should have the best among them, thanks them for their compliment, and closes the door in their faces. He turns to find out more about this decidedly puzzling Casquette Girl, but she has fled.
The leader of the gendarmes, Major Cornell (Ed Keane), is infuriated by the continued presence of Dick’s scouts within his jurisdiction, but Dick insists on keeping his men in town “for a rest” while he looks for Marietta. A chance visit to the Marionette Theatre reveals Marietta in a doll costume, singing “Ship Ahoy.” Backstage Rudolpho (Akim Tamiroff) warns Marietta that Captain Warrington is notorious as a heartbreaker.
Nevertheless, Dick manages to persuade her to accompany him on a tour of the town. They argue good naturedly until they pass an outdoor café and Marietta realizes she is hungry. At a nearby table are two members of Dick’s rustic regiment, Abe (Harold Huber) and Zeke (Ed Brophy), loudly slurping their soup. This charming interlude is interrupted by a messenger on horseback. A ship is in the harbor bearing Don Carlos and Marie’s uncle, who is offering a large reward for “Marietta Franini.” (The original stage “Marietta,” Emma Trentini, was from Naples to justify her accent, and the vestigial name remains.)
Dick sends the crowd off to the Marionette Theatre and escapes with Marietta in a small boat. Drifting in the bayou, he tells her he has a song for her, “I’m Falling in Love with Someone.” She has a song for him too, but she doesn’t know the words yet. “It’s all so mysterious,” he says. The gendarmes are waiting for them in Dick’s camp. Dick offers to fight their way out, but Marietta fears for his.life and quickly consents to return to France with her uncle and Don Carlos.
At the Governor’s house, the ladies of New Orleans who had spurned Marietta now vie with each other to meet the Princess Marie. She is elaborately dressed and coiffed for the ball in her honor. Don Carlos has been convinced by her uncle that her running away was just a girlish prank to entice him.
Julie, now married to a young man in the Governor’s service, tells Marietta that Captain Warrington has been ordered to leave town immediately on pain of death. Even as they speak, they hear the scouts passing in the road on their way up-river.
Dick has been forbidden entrance to the ball, but Major Cornell is eager to even old scores and lets him in. Dick finds Marietta. Terrified for his safety, she lies to him, telling him that she will see him tomorrow even though her ship is leaving that night. She is trying to persuade him to leave when her uncle discovers them together. “Don’t be silly, Uncle. This young man only came to say goodbye.”
The guests beg for a song. Across the crowded ballroom floor, Marietta sees Dick leaving and knows she will never see him again. The words for her song fall into place. She sings and he knows that it is just for him: “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.” The “secret of it all” is love. Dick realizes this is farewell, and forgetting his safety, he returns to sing with her. She pauses halfway up the stairs and turns to sing the emotional duet.
The song ends. Marietta rushes upstairs in tears. Her uncle furiously places her under guard. But Dick is waiting in her room to take her away “to the land beyond the mountains.” As they slip down the backstairs, her uncle discovers she is gone and rushes out on the balcony.
“Arrest them,” he cries to two nearby gendarmes. He orders the prisoners taken to the Governor’s office.
“At once!” cry the menacing gendarmes, and they do a smart about-face. It is Abe and Zeke. “We know a better way to the Governor’s office,” comments Abe. “Yeah,” murmurs Zeke. “Through the woods. Kinda pretty...”
The closing scene shows Marietta, once again in homespun, riding into the West in the arms of Captain Warrington as the scouts sing “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp” and the lovers’ voices soar in “Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found thee. |
