Monte Carlo followed The Love Parade (1930, see entry), another musical comedy which had marked director Ernst Lubitsch’s first talking picture and lead actress Jeanette MacDonald’s feature film debut. An article in the 4 May 1930 Los Angeles Times announced that principal photography on Monte Carlo had begun at Paramount Publix Corp.’s studio in Hollywood, CA. According to a 3 June 1930 Exhibitors Daily Review and Motion Pictures Today item, Macdonald’s co-star, Jack Buchanan, had to leave his role in the Broadway musical, Wake Up and Dream, which had debuted on 30 December 1929, in order to appear in this picture. Filming was completed sometime in July 1930, as indicated by various contemporary sources including the 20 July 1930 New York Times.
       In early August 1930, a preview screening in Hollywood was met with “unanimous high praise,” as noted in the 8 August 1930 Exhibitors Daily Review and Motion Pictures Today. A premiere in New York City was scheduled to take place later that month, on 27 August 1930, at the Rivoli Theatre. Nathaniel Finston, then head of the Paramount studio music department, was flown to New York to supervise the picture’s “special introductory overture” at the Rivoli, according to a 19 August 1930 Exhibitors Daily Review and Motion Pictures Today brief. A positive review of the premiere in the 28 August 1930 New York Times stated, “The merriment in this film is like the bubbles in champagne.” The 7 September 1930 Los Angeles Times lamented that Jack Buchanan lacked the “dynamic personality” of Maurice Chevalier, who had starred opposite MacDonald in The Love Parade, and also commented, “Just why Mr. Buchanan, noted always as a dancer rather than a singer, is not permitted to shake a leg, must go into the tome that is filled with Hollywood’s unanswered questions.”