Ernst Lubitsch's Love Parade (1929)

Also tossed into the mix was Ernst's fondness for Viennese and Hungarian musicals from the Strauss-Kalman-Huszka cycle of composers.
--Scott Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch Laughter in Paradise (Simon & Schuster, 1993)

In the recent course I took, Mad About Musicals, there was little discussion about Lubitsch's four musicals, all made from 1929-1934.  The course was a relatively short one and it was hard to shoehorn in Lubitsch's films, all made before the Production Code had taken full effect; the titles of such songs in The Love Parade as "Nobody's Using It Now" and "Anything to Please the Queen" give one a pretty good idea of the racy content and the complex relationship of the queen (Jeanette MacDonald) and the slightly unwilling consort (Maurice Chevalier).  There is little dancing in the movie, the dancing being done by vaudevillians Lupino Lane and Lillian Roth who, when Lane starts to tell her the one about the farmer's daughter, says "I am the farmer's daughter." Lubitsch looks backward to vaudeville and operettas (represented especially by soprano MacDonald) and forward to the more conservative musicals of Rogers and Astaire and Vincente Minnelli, which  also integrated singing and dancing into their plots (Minnelli later switched to the creative freedom of more liberal melodrama.)