While the credits say that this is an Ernst Lubitsch film, he actually died during the making of this film. Otto Preminger completed the film and I don't know whether he's to blame, Lubitsch is or both of them. Regardless, it's a very poor film...and the film that Betty Grable hated the most. It also is a movie that lost a ton of money at the box office....and after seeing the picture, I can understand why. The story is just a muddled mess.The story is set in the mid-19th century and a Contessa Angelina (Grable) just married handsome Count Mario (Cesar Romero). However, the Hungarians invade her Italian state and Mario is forced to flee. The leader of the Hungarians is the Colonel (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) and he's instantly smitten with her. Oddly, while the Contessa cannot reciprocate, a painting of a distant relative who JUST HAPPENS TO LOOK EXACTLY LIKE HER (a stupid cliché, I know) falls for him and comes out of the painting to pitch woo to the Colonel. There's more to this goofy film than this...but isn't that dopey enough to let you know why this movie is a mess?!Although the film looks great with its lovely color and sets, the story often is very dopey and makes no sense. It all just seems like a silly excuse to sing and dance. And, the overall film is a tad embarrassing at times...so I can understand Grable's feelings about this one!

Let me start out by saying that I used to really like Betty Grable, particularly from "Down Argentine Way", but by the time she got around to this disaster, she had also got "round" and frankly the whole film was an embarrassment. Costarred with Douglas Fairbanks JNr (who must have been fairly desperate) the story was bad, the colours good, and the film far too long. It had some of the old standbys in it like Harry Davenport and Reginald Gardiner to try and stimulate interest but with no success. The music score was woeful, and I have to say not one tune was memorable in any way....as I was such a fan of Miss Grable, I always wish I had never seen this one!

Lubitsch's last production but not his least interesting film. Somehow largely ignored by critics as he couldn't finish it himself and as the movie wasn't co-signed by Preminger who he did most of the staging... A very strange mix of musical (a remembrance of The Merry Widow ?)and classic Lubitsch touch sentimentalism (an impossible love-story like Cluny Brown)yet a very clever and intelligent one yet not to be understood as some nostalgia of some lost world but rather a testament on eternal feelings prevailing on the foolishness of mankind and especially men in times of war with a "moral" lesson still true today as it was in 1948. Billy wilder as an answer to Preminger who grieved at Lubitsch's funerals about having lost a great man replied that we still had his films and that sums it all up about that Lady in Ermine...

In 1948 this was my all-time favorite movie. Betty Grable's costumes were so ravishing that I wanted to grow up to be her and dress like that. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., was irresistible as the dashing Hungarian officer. Silly and fluffy as this movie might appear at first, when I was eight years old it seemed to me to say something important about relations between men and women. I saw it again the other day; I was surprised to find that it still did.