The Merry Widow. 1952. Directed by

Film

No upcoming events

Held on Sun, Jan 24, 2016, 7:00 p.m.

MoMA, Floor T2, Theater 2

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

The Merry Widow. 1952. USA. Directed by Curtis Bernhardt

The Merry Widow. 1952. USA. Directed by. 105 min.

Screenplay by Sonya Levien, William Ludwig. Music by Franz Lehar. New lyrics by Paul Francis Webster. Dances by Jack Cole. With Lana Turner, Fernando Lamas, Gwen Verdon. With a respectful nod to Albertina Rasch's celebrated choreography for Ernst Lubitsch's 1934 adaptation of the Franz Lehar operetta, Cole fuses two non-dancing MGM stars, Turner and Lamas, in an epic waltz number. The director, Curtis Bernhardt, appears to have allowed Cole’s cake-frosting color design for the climactic waltz number to dominate the entire film, while Gwen Verdon (still unbilled!) generously compensates for the non-dancing stars with a raucous and authentic can-can.

This film accompanies All That Jack (Cole).

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].