“The Merry Widow is the sexiest musical of the thirties-perhaps the sexiest musical ever,” Nancy Schwartz wrote in Film Comment. Lubitsch's last operetta adaptation updates Franz Lehar's well-worn work with lyrics by Lorenz Hart, master of the musical double entendre, and a script by Ernest Vajda and Samson Raphaelson that slants the romance in a sharply satirical direction. Jeanette MacDonald plays the eponymous widow, on whose fortune the fate of a mythical kingdom rests, and Maurice Chevalier is the dashing Captain Danilo commissioned to win her heart and her money for his country. “Lubitsch brilliantly exploits Cedric Gibbons's opulent sets, but his genius is most evident in the film's final poignancy-a farewell to the genre he helped to create” (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader).