Finale in St. Petersburg

William Powell is always worth watching carefully for his inimitable understatements capable of turning any serious business into priceless comedy. There is no Myrna Loy here but instead we have Luise Rainer playing a Russian countess and spy and being absolutely irresistible, almost like Greta Garbo in her suavity, but Garbo was too serious for comedy. Luise Rainer is all comedy and almost outrageously charming. The couple is a perfect combination, William Powell playing a Polish baron in precarious standing with the Car and aware of it. Nevertheless he accepts the classified mission of delivering a petition to the Car, and to keep it safe he applies the secret mechanism of an 18th century silver candlestick of elaborate artistry. The problem is there are two candlesticks like this, and the other one is in the care of the Russian countess Luise Rainer, who also has a mission of smuggling a secret message in her sample. Naturally they are confused in the delivery, there are many additional threads to this mess leading more and more astray, compelling the protagonists to travel all over Europe to Vienna, Budapest, Paris and London chasing the candlesticks, and they finally end up in St. Petersburg facing the Car. It's a labyrinth of a crooked sieve involving also Roland Young as the Czar's son Peter and Maureen O'Sullivan as the only serious woman in the play - the film begins in Vienna with a great New Year's Eve ball at the opera in a obligatory masquerade, where Romeo (Roland Young) meets Julia (Maureen O'Sullivan) and they keep crossing each other's paths. It's a delightful espionage play and comedy and a feast for the eyes with many humorous and risky turns on the way, while for once in a spy thriller there is not one single casualty.

Back in the '30s, the studios made dozens of movies that were set in Europe to give Americans during the Depression a sense of fantasy and other world glamor, and to keep their foreign market. "The Emperor's Candlesticks" starring William Powell and Luise Rainer is such a film, with supporting roles featuring two young stars, Robert Young and Maureen O'Sullivan. Powell and Rainer are opposing foreign agents who each hide their documents in a pair of candlesticks to be brought to Russia as a gift to a noblewoman. The candlesticks were to be delivered by Powell, but Rainer talks the Austrian who has given him the task to let her do it. They are stolen by her maid and her boyfriend, and both Powell and Rainer try to be the first to recover them.

Powell and Rainer are delightful in this crazy story. Rainer, with her small face and enormous eyes, is gorgeous, playing the part of a spy with charm. Powell is always good and plays off Rainer very well. Robert Young and Maureen O'Sullivan portray a prince and his kidnapper's accomplice, respectively, who meet at a masquerade ball, he dressed as Romeo and she as Juliet. Their last scene together is very sweet.

This movie is odd for one reason. The stars all lived for a very long time, and in fact, Rainer at this writing is still alive at the age of 96. Young lived to 91, O'Sullivan to 87, Powell to 91. Must have been something in the water on the set. Wish it had been present on more films!

Based on the Baroness Orczy tale of Russian Imperial espionage, this is actually quite a fun, if insubstantial, historical drama. It all centres around attempts to free a Polish dissident from prison. At the time, Poland was a vassal of the Czar, and so a group of influential Poles coerce the Grand Duke "Peter" (Robert Young) to write to his father imploring his intervention. What's this got to do with candlesticks, you might think? Well these clever little ornate gadgets have secret compartments - easy enough to smuggle a letter in. When they are inadvertently moved, then sold-on a few times it falls to Polish agent "Wolensky" (William Powell) to stay one step ahead of his Czarist protagonist "Countess Mironova" (Luise Rainer) and recover them before their secret is discovered and heads start to roll. Of course, you just know that these two are going to start to fall for each other, and sadly that is where the thriller element of this film starts to give way to the romantic one, and once we are in full slush mode, the whole thing rather falls away as we approach an ending that offers us little by way of jeopardy. It's a good looking film, though. Plenty of attractive people in attractive costumes; there is some chemistry between Powell and Rainer and Frank Morgan is quite fun as "Baron Suroff". Franz Waxman provides us with a rather unremarkably derivative score though - a sort of "Scarlet Empress" (1934) type affair that doesn't really help the rather uninspiring dialogue. It's my kind of genre and the Baroness did know how to conjure up a good intrigue, but this is all just a bit too join-the dots.

The handsome Prince (Robert Young) has been kidnapped and will be killed unless a Polish secret agent (William Powell) is able to sneak a ransom note to the Czar. Unfortunately, he chose a rather silly place to hide the note (inside a specially created candlestick) and it is lost. At the same time, a Russian spy (Luise Rainer) is trying to sneak in letters incriminating Powell as a spy--and also hides them inside the matching candlestick--which also is lost. Lots of intrigue follows--as well as some MGM style romance.

This film should have been better. After all, it starred the wonderful William Powell and had such supporting stars as Maureen O'Sullivan, Robert Young, Frank Morgan and Henry Stephenson--all fine actors. However, despite a decent script idea and such talent, the film was only okay. Much of this is because the script was rather tepid and talky--with too many scenes listening to the characters play verbal chess--trying to outfox each other. There was little 'zip' or excitement.

In addition, some of the blame probably resides with co-star Luise Rainer. While Ms. Rainer only made a small number of Hollywood films, she had the distinction of winning two straight Best Actress Oscars. However, when you see these two performances as well as her subsequent films you wonder why she received such accolades. The performances just didn't age well. In the last week or so I have seen six of her more famous films, I can't help but think that she was a terribly over-rated star. I'm sure she's a nice person and is still thriving today at 98 years-old. But her style of acting usually included staring wide-eyed into space and often reciting her lines in an over-eager fashion--more like a girl in a high school play than someone trying to play a realistic performance. While Ms. Rainer was better in THE EMPEROR'S CANDLESTICKS than in some of her other films (particularly DRAMATIC SCHOOL and BIG CITY), she still was not up to starring against Powell.

Now all this is NOT to say that this is a bad film--it's enjoyable enough. But there just isn't much spark or energy and could have been a lot more interesting. A decent time-passer and that's about it.

The plot of "The Emperor's Candlesticks" is total nonsense in the 1930s Hollywood fantasies about benevolent despots, courteous kidnappers, and gallant spies. The story is only an excuse for a masquerade ball and a dash across Europe in pursuit of two candelabras that do not belong to the Russian czar or the Austro-Hungarian emperor, but are a gift from an Austrian nobleman to a Russian noblewomen. The carriers (the Polish Baron Wolensky and the Russian Countess Mironova, played by the stars, William Powell and Luise Rainer) lose and find and mistakenly switch the pair of candelabras.

Powell was unflappable in the midst of many ludicrous plots during the 1930s, often with Myrna Loy as a co-conspirator. Here, he is pitted against a lovely czarist secret agent, played, in a large wardrobe, by the great Luise Rainer. In the two immediately preceding films for which she won back-to-back Oscars ("The Great Ziegfeld" with Powell and "The Good Earth" with Paul Muni) and in her only other readily available film, "The Great Waltz," she suffered mightily. In "Candlesticks" she got a chance to play the kind of glamorous clothes horse role in which Marlene Dietrich specialized, with no occasion for jealousy at all. Dietrich and Greta Garbo both played spies in 1930s movies. Each appeared more sophisticated than Rainer's, but I find Rainer more credible as a spy with regrets about the consequences of her occupation than either Dietrich or Garbo. Rainer was also quite beautiful with high cheekbones and eyebrows as plucked as Dietrich, and received star keylighting from MGM.

Back in a gilded cage, Robert Young got a chance to be charming and gallant, impeded by the humorous bumbling minder played by Frank Morgan.