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The monarch in limbo, the artist on new shores, Max Ophüls in Hollywood. "Roundheads here? In Holland?" Charles II the deposed king (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), out of England and into the Dutch underground. "False hopes, false starts, false promises," still a jolly fellow balletically dodging enemies at the marketplace while wooing the young tulip farmer (Rita Corday). Hiding in the inn, an idyll interrupted by the implacable colonel (Henry Daniell) with black chapeau like a Western assassin. The telescope iris like the camera lens, the mirror in the music box, the nasty guardian blithely kicked off the boat. "Ah, I wish I had done this to Cromwell." Old Europe in a small studio, like Renoir or Sirk or Ulmer around the same time, tracking and craning for days. An English tune played by distant bells, a bit of recognition among émigrés. Ophüls has plenty to draw upon, The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Prisoner of Zenda and the father of his athletic star, who also writes dialogue playfully verging on blank verse. The wandering actor (Robert Coote) is a gourmet playacting with peruke and prop sword, a situation reflected in Maria Montez's cameo as the Gallic countess who steps out of her chariot to contemplate the protagonist's charade. "Dee-lightful. Dee-lightful." Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (and Pabst's Don Quixote) for the climax in the windmill, crossed blades and turning gears. Return to the crown, "a moment worth waiting a dozen years for" and yet nothing without his beloved. The melancholy finale is precisely that of a swashbuckler from the cinéaste of De Mayerling à Sarajevo. "It's the way the world wags." With Nigel Bruce, Otto Waldis, Milton Owen, Colin Keith-Johnston, and Colin Kenny. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |