Aside from the virtuouso titular sequence this movie has far less to recommend than I remembered. A movie I was once proud to call one of my favorites ever (even though I'd only seen it once), it now feels like a series of gorgeous baroque paintings -- prettily lit, sumptuously colored, but a little flat and uninteresting nowadays. (I'm making that observation with little to no art history background, so feel free to call me out if the baroque period is actually awesome and I'm thinking of something else)
Anton Walbrook is more stiff than I'd remembered, and the movie honestly doesn't even quite feel like it gets going until after the titular sequence -- at which point it's almost over. There's something... underdeveloped about the tension that they're trying to convey. The stress and push-and-pull of a woman being forced to choose between the typical life of a domestic wife and the grandiosity of the stage only begins to cohede just as the movie comes to a startlingly abrupt end (I'd remembered the finale, but was surprised to discover it coming -- "oh, it's over already?").
But with all that, the sequence itself is truly a bit of amazing, expressive dancing -- every bit worthy of the praise that's been lavished upon it. And even the parts that are not it, but involve dancing, said dancing always shines in a way few dancing movies can pull off in this day and age. And there is the delightful silkiness of the pictures, that have a warmth and glow and look the soft, lush way that velvet feels. If only the characters, action, dialogue and thematic resolution could keep up, it would still be every bit the masterpiece I remembered it being.
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