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Powerful

Boring

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Enjoyable nonsense about a prince and a crooner who switch places and create confusion amongst the royals rhat fake the fake prince causes due to his presence in this King's court. Carl Brisson gives an admirable dual performance, singing beautifully and providing romance for the neglected Queen, Mary Brian, while the King goes off to have his own fling. Comic supporting roles played by Eugene Palette and Edward Everett Horton at an amusement, while Katherine DeMille adds additional beauty as the other woman who takes up with the King where the Queen would not dare to go. There is a great ballroom dance number choreographed by Leroy prince who got an Oscar nomination for this sequence. While the songs are pretty much forgotten today, they are up there with many of the classic operetta songs and are beautifully performed by both Brisson and Brian. As this was released the first year of the timing of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, I must imagine it was greatly influenced by the success of the previous years The Merry Widow, starring MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier. However the plot line remind me a great deal of the Prisoner of Zenda without the political intrigue, as well as various other similarly themed operettas that were still being revived on the stage and occasionally made into films. The mid-1930s, while the downslide of the end of the Great Depression, was still Romantic era, and audiences craves escapism like this. I can't imagine it being a great hit due to the lack of big name stars before what it is, it is truly enjoyable and well definitely a product of its time, deserves more recognition then it has gotten.

The music in this film is a cut above what you might expect. What makes it memorable is due to the song "A Little White Gardenia" which was sung a number of times by Carl Brisson and Mary Ellis. He was an acknowledged singer, but whether she did her own singing, I can not say, except it was more than adequate