The Smiling Lieutenant is a 1931 American pre-Code musical comedy film directed by Ernst Lubitsch, starring Maurice Chevalier, Claudette Colbert and Miriam Hopkins, and released by Paramount Pictures.

In Vienna, Lieutenant Nikolaus "Niki" von Preyn (Maurice Chevalier) meets Franzi (Claudette Colbert), the leader of an all-female-orchestra.

Homesick and lovesick, Niki wanders the streets, and encounters Franzi, who has continued to perform with her orchestra in Flausenthurm since the wedding, unable to move on.

The results are a complete success as the lieutenant returns home, follows his satin-clad, cigarette-puffing wife into the bedroom and closes the door – opening it briefly to give the audience a last song and suggestive wink.

[2] Chevalier described performing – "smiles and cute winks of the eye" – a "mechanical display of technique" due to grief over his mother's death.

In sets, camerawork, background music, alternations of sound and silence, thus the film reaches a certain level that makes The Love Parade and Monte Carlo look comparatively stilted".

[5] For Andrew Sarris, The Smiling Lieutenant stands between the "lilting lyricism" of Love Parade and the "tempered ironies"[6] in Trouble in Paradise.

Due to an ongoing copyright dispute with the silent-film version, The Smiling Lieutenant remained out of circulation for years and was considered as a lost film until a print was discovered in Denmark in the 1990s.