THE EMPEROR WALTZ can be best viewed today as director Billy Wilder's attempt to explain why such a schnitzel-loving country as Austria could be drafted onto the losing side of not one but TWO world wars against the Allies last century.
This story begins with an American salesman (Bing Crosby) going over to a backward European country which has barely heard of electricity and light bulbs, even though they'd been around more than three decades at the time this docudrama takes place. (Everyone knows that even Pitcairn's Island will get its first shipment of iPad 2's before they've been out a week.) To add insult to injury, when the salesman is savvy enough of local mores to offer his prototype iPod to the local honcho, this emperor's backward thugs throw the entertainment device into a goldfish pond, proclaiming it a weapon of mass destruction. This is clearly Wilder's allegorical riff on the tragic events kicking off WWI.
The rest of the movie is about dog breeding, an obvious allusion to the Aryan eugenics mania practiced by Hitler and his Austrian cronies up to and during WWII. Is the Austrian working class (well represented in this movie by chauffeurs, maids, teamsters, hunting guides, cops, etc.) protesting in the streets over all these evil shenanigans? Heck no! Wilder shows us. They just gallivant about without a care in the world, dancing and yodeling for no reason, oblivious to the grim fate in store for them. Clearly, THE EMPEROR WALTZ was the major influence inspiring Mel Brooks to write "Springtime for Hitler" into his blockbuster, THE PRODUCERS.
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