Paramount Pictures’ continental sophistication comes to Warner Brothers, along with Claudette Colbert, lenser Charles Lang & dress designer Travis Banton*, for Jacques Deval’s international hit play about ‘White’ Russian nobility taking house positions in Paris rather than touch the ℱ40 million given to them by the late Tsar to support the counter-revolution. Working off Robert Sherwood’s just closed B’way adaptation, scripter Casey Robinson notes how close the family situation is to MY MAN GODFREY, and has Colbert & husband Charles Boyer get the house & family in order with expertise in fencing, dancing, singing and poker, even managing to get the parents back to a single bed (implied if not actually shown). But when the new servants have to serve a formal dinner to current Russian diplomat Basil Rathbone, the Revolutionary who tortured them before they escaped, now out to collect that ℱ40 mill, the facade crumbles on both sides of their charade. The first in a long run of Warners pics for Anatole Litvak, reunited with Boyer after MAYERLING/’36, the tone now feels a bit forced in the first half (it was only Litvak’s second Hollywood pic), but gathers strength as comedy gets downplayed once Rathbone comes into the story for a more serious, if still lightly sentimental, tone. They even manage to finesse the proletariat/aristo divide in a satisfying manner. Lovely work by everyone. Though how echt Hollywood to have Americans & Brits playing Parisians and two actual French natives as the Russians.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Not so many Hollywood films, other than The THIN MAN series, let long married couples display this much sexual interest in each other.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Seems very extravagant for those penny-pinching Warner Brothers to bring in Banton when Colbert spends most of the film in a maid’s uniform! Maybe he just did the glam number she wears right at the end. And cinematographer Lang apparently fought with Colbert about the usual problem, shooting from her ‘bad’ side. Though they must have made up as he went on to six more films with her back at Paramount.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Similar elements/reverse angle; perfected by Ernst Lubitsch in NINOTCHKA/’39. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/12/ninotchka-1939.html
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