Opera on film has always been a sticky widget, so to speak - the two uber-forms go together like elephants and hippos, cluttering up the same waterhole. Still, even Wagner and Mozart have had it better than the beloved and, for some, reverence-worthy oeuvre of Gilbert and Sullivan - there was only the ill-conceived movie version of The Pirates of Penzance (1983), and a few dozen filmed or taped presentations for TV broadcast (going back to a 1939 NBC version of H.M.S. Pinafore). This paucity seems odd, because not only is the G&S catalogue accessible and sung in English, it's also witty and relatively familiar to English-speaking audiences, even in the U.S. (Certain 120-year-old songs, like "I Am the Captain of the Pinafore, "The Major-General's Song," and "Three Little Maids," are still prevalent in the popular culture, reused and recognizable as melodies if not by title.) The lone notable filmization of the G&S arsenal, Victor Schertzinger's The Mikado (1939), has been newly released into posterity as a Criterion disc, and for the G&S cult worldwide it is a must-have, a long-awaited prize that not only captures the spirit of the original British stagings of the operetta, but also employs the original D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, which debuted most of the G&S works and staged the catalogue in London and worldwide for over a century, from the 1870s until it finally closed in 1982.

The name D'Oyly Carte is enough to send any Gilbert-Sullivanian into a salivating swoon - theater is by definition a transitory art form, but Schertzinger's movie provides fans with the only imperishable artifact connected to the original Savoy opera productions. This shouldn't be dismissed - preserving reality and history "with lightning" (as per Woodrow Wilson) is what nearly everyone thought cinema was for in the very beginning, and the medium's ability to capture something in ambered time remains one of its most electrifying assets. (Compare, abstractly, your experience of seeing a stunt man risk his life for real in a 20th century film against seeing a digital "stunt" in something newer - it's the difference between seeing the Statue of Liberty in person and holding a Statue-shaped paperweight.) From the word go, Schertzinger's movie is a nonpareil for strictly historical reasons - were it that Rossini or Wagner had been as lucky.

What we get in movie terms is a little more difficult to appreciate - it's a tremendously silly operetta, with a stagebound mise-en-scene that leaves no question in the viewer's mind that he or she is watching an adapted stage production first, a film-for-film's-sake second. At the same time, a subtle effort is made to manifest the space of Titipu in ways that no stage production could manage. A lot of parallels come to mind - Schertzinger's color compositions and style seem to forecast the vibe of the color Powell-Pressburger films of the '40s and '50s, and the much of the film's design and costuming seems suspiciously Oz-like, in the same year as the equally Technicolor Warner release of The Wizard of Oz. (Several characters, including Sydney Granville's Pooh-Bah, look and behave like inflated Munchkins.) But most of all the trademarked Gilbert & Sullivan choral explosion - an exultant, boisterous trope distinctive to their development of British operetta - recalls the comic songs of the Marx Brothers (particularly, Duck Soup's "Hail Freedonia!"), which, it's plain to see, were conscientious parodies of the G & S style. It's not surprising to find that Groucho Marx, a lifelong G & S fan, held The Mikado in a special place in his heart, and even starred in a 1960 television production, as Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner of Titipu.

The story of The Mikado - a forbidden love between Ko-Ko's designated ward and fiancee Yum-Yum and Nanki-Poo, the undercover wandering son of the titular Japanese emperor - is ironic fluff and treated so in the operetta, and its sense of sardonic absurdity certainly rescues the film from any retrospective accusations of exoticism or Orientalist caricature. After all, the feints toward Japanese-ness are not only far off the mark but deliberately so. We could balk if we wished at all of these Anglo-Saxon actors (including Kenny Baker, an American addition as Nanki-Poo, who was a cohort of Jack Benny's) with slanty-eye make-up and outrageous pidgin-English accents, but The Mikado is nothing if not a play and film about 19th-century Britishers, and a scathing farce about how the Brits saw ill-explored Asian cultures. The faux-Oriental design of the sets is like a deranged, half-informed child's idea of Japan, down to the mysterious presence of a giant Buddha, whose retractable belly becomes a hiding spot deep in the story. But the play was widely accepted by critics in its day (1885) to employ a cartoony Japan in order to openly mock British politicians and institutions of the time, including royalty. In 1939, that meaning stood, but as something nostalgic - as WWII loomed, the foibles of Victorians and the matter of fading empire were almost quaint satirizables, bid farewell with the merriest, literally, of how-de-do's.

It's a refreshing piece for its day, because Gilbert & Sullivan's full-blooded songs are all absolutely integral to the story (back when the norm had musicals' disparate numbers inserted into the plot with little or no justification). Of course it doesn't hold a candle to filmmaker Mike Leigh's magisterial 1999 film Topsy-Turvy, which recounts in rousing detail the production of The Mikado and the fading careers of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, and if Schertzinger's film impels you to seek out Leigh's, or vice-versa, more's the better. The Criterion edition comes with a number of fascinating additionals, including a 1926 promo film for the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company), and, naturally, an interview with the loquacious Leigh, who in a long and apparently impromptu monologue details the significance of The Mikado and the genesis of his own film in hilarious and minute detail.

For more information about The Mikado, visit The Criterion Collection. To order The Mikado, go to TCM Shopping.

by Michael Atkinson