A poet is hired by the owner of a wax museum in a circus to write tales about Harun al Raschid, Ivan the Terrible and Jack the Ripper. While writing, the poet and the daughter of the owner, Eva, fantasize the fantastic stories and fall in love for each other.
A charismatic lieutenant newly assigned to a remote fort is captured by a group of mountain bandits, thus setting in motion a madcap farce that is Lubitsch at his most unrestrained. A wonderfully anarchic and playfully subversive satire of military life from one of the great comedy filmmakers.
Vienna glove-sales-lady Christel falls in love with Russian Czar Alexander. Austrian Prince Metternich tries to use this and other pleasant diversions to keep him out of the negotiation conferences of the 1815 Vienna Congress.
