Perry Kate Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

Sienna-Rose Mclaughlin The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Claudio Carvalho In Austria, the American traveling salesman Virgil Smith (Bing Crosby) arrives in the palace of Emperor Franz-Joseph I (Richard Haydn) with his mongrel dog Button expecting to sell one gramophone to him to promote his sales in the country. However, the guards believe he has a time-bomb and he does not succeed in his intent. When the dog Sheherazade of the widowed Countess Johanna Franziska von Stolzenberg-Stolzenberg (Joan Fontaine) bites Button, Virgil visits her and sooner he falls in love for Johanna and Button for Sheherazade that is promised to breed with the Emperor's dog. When Virgil asks permission to marry Johanna to the Emperor, the nobleman exposes to the salesman that their difference of social classes would doom their marriage and offers a business to Virgil. "The Emperor Waltz" is a delightful and naive romance of Billy Wilder, with parallel human and canine love stories like the dogs were the alter-egos of their owners. The art direction and the set decoration are amazing, and the scene of the ball is awesome. Joan Fontaine is extremely beautiful and shows a great chemistry with Bing Crosby, but the dog Button steals the movie and is responsible for the funniest moments. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): "A Valsa do Imperador" ("The Emperor Waltz")

Kevin Clarke I find it amazing, that Wilder - 12 years after the Broadway success of Erik Charell's WHITE HORSE INN, and 18 years after the Berlin premiere of the show by the same creative team (a version Wilder certainly saw, since it was the talk of the town he lived in at the time) - re-uses many of the elements that made that revue-operetta such a smash hit: those pop art Tirolean costumes and villages, the lake, the jodels, the dancers in Lederhosen and Dirndl... some of the village scenes and costumes actually look, as if Wilder was using the original operetta-designs by Ernst Stern. He even quotes original operetta music (by Lehár, instead of Ralph Benatzky, just to mislead the viewer - and maybe avoid copyright problems.) Also, the basic idea of the Charell/Hans Müller operetta is re-used here: a man from a different culture ends up in the Alps and has to cope with a totally different 'Austrian' way of life. In the original it's the Berlin industrialist Giesecke, in the movie it's Bing Crosby as the American salesman. In both cases, the clash of cultures is delightful to watch and makes for some hilariously comic scenes. Perhaps, in the movie, Crosby is not the ideal 'ironic' actor needed for a story of this kind... (he plays the story rather 'straight'). Still, Wilder makes sure the viewer understands that it is all a gigantic joke. (Actually, he even shows the Austrian Kaiser as a silly old fool, exactly like in the operetta.) It would be interesting to analyze show and film. Even though theater historians prefer to ignore films, and film historians prefer to ignore theater productions. But, as Richard Norton pointed out in his essay on the career of WHITE HORSE INN in the English speaking world, Warner Brothers bought the rights for a film version of the operetta and thought of casting Al Jolson, Maurice Chevalier, Eddie Cantor or Jack Okie in the movie. Just imagine what a movie it would/could have been with Bing Crosby as the suave lead, and with Billy Wilder directing. Perhaps WHITE HORSE INN never made it to Hollywood, but this film is the closest the operetta ever got to being turned into a big, splashy, wonderful, colorful and very, very funny film. Definitely worth watching - and copying, for anyone who wants to put on WHITE HORSE INN on stage. Wilder know how to make these kind of stories sparkle and shine. Visually and musically.

ryancm What a nice delightful film this turned out to be. I'm in my musical phase of movies, and while this really cannot be classified as a true "musical", it does have a couple on nice songs and a short dance sequence. I guess you could classify this as a "quasi-musical". Anyway, the story is fun with the typical Billy Wilder political overtones that do not detract from the plot line. The scenery is great, as is Bing Crosby and Richard Haydin. Joan Fontaine is fine in what is asked of her. The real stars are the two dogs. Their scenes are delightful, as is the film. While there is a tad of dramatics at the end, it all turns out fine as expected. Would have like to have the fade-out of the two dogs cuddling up. See this one for a royal treat.

theowinthrop This is not a great Billy Wilder film, but any film he's involved in is worth looking at. Like Orson Welles, even when he's below par in his work he's ahead of the pack. Here Wilder is going back to his roots - he came from Austria, and just left it before the Nazi seized control (I think two aunts of his died in concentration camps). Wilder knew what the highbound, tradition controlled court and government of Austria Hungary was like, with it's unofficial racism towards Jews and Slavs. Only Hungarians (by force) got equal treatment to the Austrians in the government and army. If Jews did well in the professions or business they were hated for it. Only Erich von Stroheim would have had a similar idea of the truth, but he looked elsewhere at the sordidness of the court - at it's sexual peccadillos. But the film is not successful in capturing that image. It comes closest when Richard Haydn (as the old Emperor Franz Joseph - possibly his best straight acting job/though his performance as a sadistic nobleman in FOREVER AMBER is close to it)tells Bing Crosby why the marriage between him and Joan Fontaine would fail. Fontaine would soon be pining for those fine aristocratic experiences and events that she would never be able to go back to once she married a commoner. Haydn compares aristocrats to snails - serene and haughty in their little shells, but remove them from their shells and they die. It may be wrong here (the movie ends with Crosby and Fontaine united), but in reality it hasn't always worked. Look at the tradition bound Windsor family and their marriage fiascos.Oddly enough, just as Wilder failed in his attempt to make a film about the Austro-Hungarian Empire Max Ophuls made the classic Viennese romance of that period - A LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN, starring Fontaine and Louis Jordan. It was not on the scale of THE EMPEROR WALTZ, but it is better remembered and enjoyed, and gave Fontaine a memorably tragic character. If one wants to get a glimmer of the zeitgeist of old Wien see the Ophuls movie. And if not that see a British film starring Lili Palmer, BEWARE OF PITY, which also captures the neurosis of the upper classes in that age. As for THE EMPEROR WALTZ, watch it for Haydn's fine performance, Crosby's singing and comic moments (when he turns a phonograph into a 19th Century berry juicer, which is a lovely little scene), and Roland Culver's social plotting. You'll find these all quite enough to enjoy the movie.