Old Heidelberg, a.k.a. The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (MGM, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The World, the Flesh and the Devil I kept TCM on for a “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation of a long-time favorite movie of mine: a 1927 film variously called Old Heidelberg (that’s the name on the official title) and The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (the title of the 1922 Sigmund Romberg/Dorothy Donnelly operetta based on the same story) starring Ramon Novarro, Norma Shearer and Jean Hersholt and brilliantly directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Old Heidelberg originated in 1898 as a German novel by a man named Wilhelm Meyer-Förster, who not only published it under the title Karl Heinrich – after the central character, a spoiled-rotten prince of a German domain called “Karlsburg” who gets sent to Heidelberg University, where he meets and falls in love with a barmaid named Kathi – but even signed the novel “Karl Heinrich,” as if he were presenting it as the central character’s autobiography. Meyer-Förster later (1901) adapted his novel into a play, and in 1915 the first film was made, produced by D. W. Griffith, directed by John Emerson (Anita Loos’s husband) and starring Wallace Reid as Karl Heinrich, Dorothy Gish as Kathi and Erich von Stroheim in the minor role of Lutz, one of Karl Heinrich’s fellow students at Heidelberg and a man with a penchant for dueling. There’s a claim that MGM offered Stroheim, who by then had become a major director with a penchant for long running times and letting his films go way over budget due to his intense commitment to realism, the directorship of the 1927 version, but by then – even though Stroheim was coming off one of his biggest hits, the first of three films of Franz Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow – he and MGM production chief Irving Thalberg hated each other so much Stroheim refused to work for him again. Instead Thalberg hired Lubitsch, whose history TCM host Jacqueline Stewart oddly mis-presented in her intro.

She said that Lubitsch had made his initial reputation in Germany on the basis of massive historical spectacles based on infamous royal mistresses like Madame Du Barry and Anne Boleyn – which is true – and he came to the U.S. at the behest of Mary Pickford, who hired him to direct her in the 1923 film Rosita. Where Stewart went wrong was in saying that it wasn’t until the sound era that Lubitsch became known for the subtle romantic comedies with which the name “Lubitsch” is associated today. In fact, once Rosita was a box-office flop Lubitsch was picked up on the rebound by Warner Bros., then a minor studio, and given rom-com scripts like The Marriage Circle, Three Women, Forbidden Paradise, Kiss Me Again, Lady Windemere’s Fan (based on the play by Oscar Wilde) and So This Is Paris before being loaned out to MGM for Old Heidelberg. This film is full of the fabled “Lubitsch touches,” including an early scene in which the young Prince Karl Heinrich (Philippe de Lacy) is playing catch with two very bored-looking adults – only through the gates of the palace he sees a group of boys his own age having spontaneous fun playing catch with the same sort of ball – and one later on in which he’s being quizzed by his tutors on how well he’s learned his lessons being homeschooled in court. He’s asked when Philip II reigned – and at first I thought of Philip II of Spain, who ruled in the 16th century (he was the king who sent the Spanish Armada in a vain attempt to conquer England and force it to re-adopt Roman Catholicism as its religion), but no-o-o-o-o: they mean Philip II of Karlsburg. Karl Heinrich is stumped until his tutor, Dr. Jüttner (Jean Hersholt), stands in front of the real Philip II’s royal portrait, which helpfully gives the dates of his life as the 18th century.

The film, brilliantly photographed by John Mescall (who’d turn up a decade later as the cinematographer on James Whale’s Show Boat, despite his alcoholism that had made other directors and producers wary of working with him), is at once a romantic idyll and an illustration of Thomas Wolfe’s old adage that “you can’t go home again.” Karl Heinrich has a happy time at Heidelberg (even though, as usual, the “education” part of higher education is given short shrift; we see only one actual classroom, and it’s just a professor giving Karl Heinrich a lecture in a room that’s otherwise empty) until his father, stuck-up King Karl VII (Gustav von Seyffertitz, for once playing something other than a nasty villain), gets sick. At first Karl Heinrich is sure it’ll be just a temporary absence – dad will get better and he’ll be back to Heidelberg and the waiting arms of Kathi – only the old king croaks and Karl Heinrich has to assume the throne and go ahead with the dynastic marriage his dad had arranged for him with Ilse, Princess of Altenburg. He returns to Heidelberg for old time’s sake and discovers that the old inn where Kathi had worked is in a dilapidated state – “the students never even come here anymore,” Kathi’s uncle Rüder (Otis Harlan) tells him – and Kathi herself is still there but tells him that the two will both marry other people and be happy. Earlier Kathi had shown him a photo of the homely man her parents wanted her to marry, and the scene is full of intimations of Novarro’s real-life Gayness that made me wonder if the writers of this film (the only writing credits are to Marian Ainslee and Ruth Cummings for the intertitles and “Karl Heinrich” for the original novel) were pulling the same trick on Novarro their colleagues at Universal-International would pull on Rock Hudson a generation later. Not only does Kathi respond to showing Karl Heinrich her sort-of fiancé’s photo with the acid comment, “Would you marry him?,” but later a drunken student (in-house MGM comedian George K. Arthur) comes into the room where Karl Heinrich and Kathi are hanging out and kisses both of them.

My husband Charles and I had seen Old Heidelberg once before, when I made the mistake of running a videotape of it and then showing the disastrous 1953 remake, also from MGM, which used the Romberg-Donnelly score and ran afoul of Mario Lanza’s bizarre primo don antics. It seems that Lanza was cast as Karl Heinrich and also pre-recorded the great songs from Romberg’s and Donnelly’s operetta, then when MGM production chief Dore Schary tried to get him to slim down to a camera-friendly weight and start going to acting rehearsals, Lanza put him off with a flood of obscenities and sued to demand that the studio be forbidden from using the pre-recordings he’d made. MGM responded by hiring Edmond Purdom to play Karl Heinrich on screen and got Lanza’s suit thrown out of court (it’s clear from Schary’s memoir Heyday, my source for this story, that Schary was compassionate towards Judy Garland and her difficulties but venomously hated Lanza). At the time I remember wishing that Lubitsch could have remade this film in the 1930’s with Jeanette MacDonald (whom Lubitsch had discovered and cast in her first film, 1929’s The Love Parade) and Nelson Eddy. Later I read Edward Baron Turk’s biography of MacDonald and found that MGM had indeed offered The Student Prince to her and Eddy, but MacDonald had turned it down because it would have been more his film than hers (a real pity and a case of an artist’s ego denying us what could have been a great movie).