THE KING AND THE CHORUS GIRL (1937)

The deposed King Alfred VII is living a dissolute life in Paris with his only two subjects, Count Humbert and Duchess Anna, who act as his servants. One morning, Alfred lies in bed, seemingly dying but actually hungover—he never has any fun because, as the Duchess says, it takes him "three days to pass out, three days to come to," then Humbert notes, "And then it's always Sunday." His doctor diagnoses him with acute boredom. They take him out to the Folies Bergère where he is smitten with Dorothy, a chorus girl who he thinks is flirting with him by flashing light in his face with a small mirror, though it turns out that she flashes that light at whoever happens to be sitting where he sat. Attracted to her, he asks her over for dinner, but when she arrives, he's already forgotten about her and is asleep in bed. The next day, to goad Alfred, Humbert tells him that Dorothy never even showed up, which intrigues Alfred who is used to getting what he wants. Humbert and Anna contact Dorothy and enlist her in a plan: Anna thinks that Alfred needs someone who will resist him in order to come back to life, and she agrees to be the resister. Their first date at her place is a disaster because he's already drunk when he shows up. He passes out on her bed and she goes to his apartment to sleep. Slowly he warms up to her, and she to him, but when she realizes that a King would most likely not marry a commoner, she gets Humbert to hire an American waiter to pose as her fiancé to help her break things off. As you might expect, there is eventually a happy ending for the king and the chorus girl who are last seen heading to Niagara Falls.

This is, for the most part, a totally average 1930s rom-com, in many ways not that different from more modern iterations today on the Hallmark Channel. The script was co-written by Groucho Marx, and many critics find it disappointing that it's so pedestrian. But I suspect he was brought in as a joke doctor to work on the screenplay by Norman Krasna. Some of the lines are fairly Marxian: "How did you find Belgium?"; "I didn’t look for it." When Dorothy says to Humbert that there is no royalty in America, he replies, "A smart, well-dressed royalty is awfully good for the tourist trade." There is also a fun running gag about an ancestor who was Alfred IV & V. These bits are sprinkled throughout the movie, but the actors' delivery doesn’t always do them justice. Joan Blondell, as Dorothy, is quite good, as is Edward Everett Horton as the scheming and dithering Humbert. Mary Nash is a bit bland as Anna, though it's nice to see Jane Wyman in a small role. Fernand Gravet (who later went by Gravey) is a letdown as the King—he seems to be trying to throw himself into the part, but he's all surface, no depth. He only made a handful of movies in Hollywood, with his biggest role as Johann Strauss in THE GREAT WALTZ, but he had a long career in French films up to his death in 1970. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy who went on to better things, like THE WIZARD OF OZ. Pictured are Nash, Gravet, and Horton. [TCM]