---
title: "Naughty Marietta"
year: 1935
kind: "film"
canonical: "https://film.one/film/naughty-marietta"
fi1m_score: 64
critics_reviews: 3
published: "2026-09-19T23:00:33.798981+00:00"
updated: "2026-09-19T23:00:54.161863+00:00"
region: "US"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# Naughty Marietta (1935)

Directed by W. S. Van Dyke · 1h 43m · MPA NR · Music, Romance

**Fi1m score: 64** · Critics: 3 of 6 reviews so far

*In a sentence:* Two enormous voices and, standing between them, roughly one actor

> MGM’s first pairing of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy is a creaky costume romance carried by two magnificent voices and a supporting cast that does most of the acting. When the leads sing, it is lovely. When they talk, it is 1935 in the least flattering sense.

## Synopsis

France, in the days of the old monarchy. Marietta (Jeanette MacDonald), a princess of the house of de Namours de la Bonfain, is being married off by her uncle the Prince (Douglass Dumbrille) to the Spanish grandee Don Carlos (Walter Kingsford), a man she has no intention of living with. She slips out of Paris by trading places with a servant girl and boards a ship of brides bound for New Orleans, to be handed out to the colonists on arrival. Pirates take the ship. A troop of mercenary scouts led by Captain Richard Warrington (Nelson Eddy) takes it back, singing as they come. In New Orleans, Marietta hides from Governor d’Annard (Frank Morgan) and his wife (Elsa Lanchester), earns her keep singing at a puppet show, and tries very hard not to fall for the captain.

## Review

MGM’s tagline promised Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy together for the first time, and that is the whole of the film’s ambition: put two big voices in powdered wigs, hand them Victor Herbert’s operetta and let them sing at each other until the reels run out. W. S. Van Dyke directs, Hunt Stromberg produces, and nobody involved is under any illusion about what the audience came for. On those terms *Naughty Marietta* delivers. On any other terms it is a stiff, dated thing, and it is fair to say so before saying how much of it we enjoyed anyway.

MacDonald is the reason to stay. She had been doing this for years by 1935 and it shows: she plays the runaway princess with a sly, quick comic timing that the script does not always deserve, and when she opens her throat in the New Orleans marketplace for the Italian Street Song, the picture briefly stops being a museum piece. Her coloratura is fast, clean and a little showy, and she knows it is showy, which is the joke. She is also the only person on screen who seems to be having fun.

Eddy is the problem, and it is a problem the film cannot sing its way around. The baritone is enormous, warm and effortless; you could hear him from the back of the largest cinema in the country with the doors shut. The acting is another matter. He wooes MacDonald with the expression of a man reading the words off the inside of his hat, and in the love scenes his arms hang as though someone has forgotten to tell them what to do. We winced, more than once, at the sight of MacDonald working a scene while her leading man stood beside her like a lamppost in a tricorn.

The relief comes from the character players, who understood that a Ruritanian romance needs people in it. Frank Morgan flutters and dithers as the governor, all wounded dignity and no spine, and Elsa Lanchester as his wife is a small, sharp, bird-like terror who steals every dinner she attends. Douglass Dumbrille makes the uncle properly cold. Joseph Cawthorn, as the puppet-show man Schumie, gets the warmest scenes in the film and plays them without asking for credit. Between them they supply the wit that the leads cannot.

The script is by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, who had written [*The Thin Man*](https://film.one/film/the-thin-man) for Van Dyke the year before, with John Lee Mahin, and the odd thing is how little of that snap survives. The plot is pure operetta furniture: a swapped identity, a ship of brides, pirates who arrive and leave in about four minutes, a governor who must not find out. The dialogue between the numbers exists to get us to the next number. William H. Daniels photographs it all on soundstages and does not pretend otherwise, but he lights MacDonald with great care, so her close-ups have a soft silver glow that the rest of the picture lacks. Blanche Sewell cuts the songs sensibly, holding on the singers rather than fidgeting, and keeps the whole thing to 103 minutes, which is about right.

And then the two voices join, and we were got at. There is a duet late on that we will not describe, a melody the film has been teasing in fragments from the start, and when it finally arrives complete, MacDonald’s soprano over Eddy’s baritone, we found we had stopped minding about the lamppost. It is the one moment where the film’s calculation and its feeling are in the same place. Herbert wrote a tune that does the work, and the two of them simply let it.

See it for the singing, for Lanchester, and for MacDonald being funnier than her material. Do not see it for the romance, which is conducted between one actress and one voice. Watch it at home, where you can lean into the numbers and lean out of the wooing, and where Eddy’s stillness looks less like a fault of the film and more like a fault of the furniture.

*Fi1m score 64, published 19 September 2026.*

### Reviews we read (3)

- **The New York Times** (90/100, inferred): The critic finds the MGM screen version of the Victor Herbert operetta gayly romantic and rhapsodically tuneful under W. S. Van Dyke's direction. The standout element praised is the powerful, fortissimo singing of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, especially on the hit songs. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/1935/03/23/archives/the-capitol-offers-a-new-version-of-naughty-marietta-the-man-who.html)
- **Variety** (70/100, inferred): The review notes that the singing of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy must carry the adaptation of the Victor Herbert operetta. It singles out MacDonald's particularly fine singing, aided by strong recording and exceptional photography, while finding the story serviceable but not especially naughty. [Read](https://variety.com/1934/film/reviews/naughty-marietta-1200411024/)
- **Time Out**, TM (40/100, inferred): The first MacDonald-Eddy vehicle is an adaptation of Victor Herbert's operetta set in New Orleans, with the leads as a simpering duo. The fine supporting cast provides some relief. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/naughty-marietta)

## Details

- **Director:** W. S. Van Dyke
- **Director:** W. S. Van Dyke
- **Screenplay:** Frances Goodrich, John Lee Mahin, Albert Hackett
- **Cinematography:** William H. Daniels
- **Editor:** Blanche Sewell
- **Music:** Victor Herbert
- **Producer:** Hunt Stromberg, W. S. Van Dyke
- **Cast:** Jeanette MacDonald as Marietta; Nelson Eddy as Captain Richard Warrington; Frank Morgan as Gov. Gaspar d'Annard; Elsa Lanchester as Madame d'Annard; Douglass Dumbrille as Prince de Namours de la Bonfain, Marietta's Uncle; Joseph Cawthorn as Herr 'Schumie' Schuman; Cecilia Parker as Julie; Walter Kingsford as Don Carlos
- **Runtime:** 1h 43m
- **Certificate (MPA):** NR
- **Release (the US):** 29 March 1935
- **Genres:** Music, Romance
- **Budget:** $782,000
- **Box office:** $2 million

## Where to watch in the US

Not streaming, renting or buying in the US at the last check.

## Awards

- Academy Awards 1936: Best Picture (nominated); Best Sound (won)

## If you liked this

- *Love Me Tonight* (1932): MacDonald with Maurice Chevalier, and a director, Mamoulian, who could make songs move.
- *Rose-Marie* (1936): The second MacDonald-Eddy pairing, out among the Mounties, and Eddy has loosened slightly.
- *The Pirate* (1948): Garland and Kelly in the Caribbean, with pirates who are actually part of the joke.
- *The Umbrellas of Cherbourg* (1964): Everything sung, everything in colour, and the romance treated as if it mattered.
- *Top Hat* (1935), Fi1m 87: Same year, same studio system, and two leads who could both act between the numbers. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/top-hat.md)

---
© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/naughty-marietta