Tovarich

Delightful sophisticated `continental' comedy (kind of a `reverse' Ninotchka), so entertaining indeed, that when it ends you have the feeling that it moved along too swiftly, keeping you wanting at least 30 minutes more of film!

French born actors, Charles Boyer and Claudette Colbert work together wonderfully well, under Anatole Litvak's very good direction, in this engaging comedy, based upon a french play adapted by Robert E. Sherwood himself, about two penniless members of the highest rank Russian nobility (escaped from the 1917 Russian Revolution) currently living in Paris, who masquerade as commoners in order to be hired as servants of an aristocratic household, full of sort-of-zany and bizarre characters.

Isabel Jeans and Melville Cooper are perfectly cast as the aristocratic couple, Mr. and Mrs. Dupont, who hire them, absolutely unaware of their new butler's and maid's pedigrees. Basil Rathbone, as always, gives an excellent performance as Comissar Gorotchenko, a very `special' guest at a lavish dinner party arranged by the Duponts, one of the funniest (and at the same time, most dramatic) sequences of the movie.

Boyer and Colbert are so utterly charming that one does not wonder why the Duponts and both, their daughter and son, are completely conquered and taken by the `undercover' Royal Russians, Prince Mikail Alexandrovitch Ouratieff (Boyer) and Grand Duchess Tatiana Petrovna Romanov (Colbert), known by them as Michel & Tina.

This was the third and last pairing of its leading stars, who had previously worked together successfully at Paramount Pictures, in `The Man From Yesterday' (1932) and `Private Worlds' (1935).

Claudette Colbert and Charles Boyer make a delightful team in this stylish thirties comedy. This film is creative and amusing in much the same manner as My Man Godfry. For anyone who enjoys black and white films this will be enjoyable. It has something about it of the grace and style of the old Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers films.

Charles Boyer and Claudette Colbert are always good if not excellent, and this film is worth watching for their sake. Basil Rathbone also makes one of his good appearances. The story is more arguable. Boyer and Colbert are refugees from the Russian revolution, and as Russian aristocrats of the highest order they end up in Paris, where they have to turn to extreme measures in order to survive, including even stealing. Finally they get work as servants in a rich Frenchman's house, where at a party one of their deadliest enemies from Russia, the bolshevik commissar Basil Rathbone turns up as a guest, and there are some arguments. That is all. The main theme of the story is the obligation of the aristocrats (Boyer and Colbert) to stick to their code of honour, and in that process they commit the most incredible acts contrary to common sense. If this comedy is supposed to be flippant and witty, it doesn't raise many laughs. The funniest person is the fat dinner lady of a guest who speaks a language that is impossible for anyone to understand, performing a feat of unintelligibility. The start of the film is rather amusing, but then all of the rest seems mainly rather awkward. Still Anatole Litvak is the director and Max Steiner made the music. They have both done better.

Sort of "My Man Godfrey" meets "Ninotchka", this is a frothy, entertaining comedy directed by Anatole Litvak, whose Hollywood movies I'm currently working my way through. The plot is pretty contrived, but no more than with other screwball comedies of the time. Boyer and Goddard had been in two movies before, neither of which I've seen, and are very comfortable together playing a now impoverished Russian noble couple, displaced by the revolution to Paris, where they live a literally hand to mouth existence. Boyer is a Russian prince in exile, apparently entrusted by the Tsar with a fortune in Russian currency for safekeeping, Goddard his duchess wife. They live anonymously in a cheap Parisian garret, with a broken bed and Goddard reduced to pilfering foodstuffs from the local market, but they resolutely refuse to tap into the fund to ease their plight.

Instead, they wind up taking jobs as a butler and maid in the grand house of wealthy French aristocrats where they put their reverse-knowledge of servitude to good use by quickly making themselves indispensable to the middle-aged scatterbrain husband and wife at the head of the house and their spoilt young-adult son and daughter. In fact, it's not long before father and son fall for the effervescent Colbert while mother and daughter form separate crushes on the debonair Boyer but things get complicated when a former Bolshevik general now elevated to high-ranking civil status, in the form of Basil Rathbone, turns up to a household soirée thrown by the Parisian couple. Rathbone's character has a stormy history with Boyer and Goddard, having persecuted and prosecuted them back in the homeland, to the extent of once perpetrating torture on Boyer in the past and who now wants his hands on the treasure-trove the couple are safeguarding.

It all comes to a head at an amusing scene where the duo have to serve food to Rathbone and other Russian dignitaries at an evening meal, who, to mix matters up further, immediately recognise their former betters.

While some of the humour is a little forced and the denouement a bit too pat, as the formerly gentrified couple meekly accept their new positions of servitude in Western democracy, once the action moves to Paris, there are some amusing scenes and situations along the admittedly cliched upstairs - downstairs / capital - communism lines.

I like Goddard in almost everything in which I've seen her and was genuinely surprised at Boyer's facility with comedy. I also liked the madcap family who adopt them. Director Litvak shows an equal aptitude for staging comedy in a little-known film I'm rather glad I was able to track down.

(1937) Tovarich COMEDY

Adapted from the play by Jacques Deval produced and directed by Anatole Litvak that has Grand Duchess, Tatiana Petrovna Romanov (Claudette Colbert) and her Prince, Mikail Alexandrovitch Ouratieff (Charles Boyer) attempt to elude capture from the Russian Revolution, to prevent returning a large sum of money intended for the Russian cause. They escape to Paris where they pose as butler and maid employed by the Dupont family of Fermonde (Isabel Jeans) and her husband Charles (Melville Cooper) and their two children, Helene (Anita Louise) and Georges (Maurice Murphy). It is not the matter of who's going to discover them but a question of when. The title "Tovarich" as the movie is called is the Russian word for "comrade" or "friend". Basil Rathbone also stars as the Soviet commissar, Dimitri Gorotchenko.

Sometimes it is hard to enjoy a movie considering what's going on, both during the Stalin era and the Putin era.