Tovarich

I kept hearing this movie being compared to ninotchka, which is a movie I love, so I decided to check this out on turner classic movies. The plot can be confusing at times and their are a couple of funny scenes. Claudette Colbert and Charles Boyer are both good and so is Basil Rasthbone.

Adapted from a French play authored by Jacques Deval, Tovarich had a successful run on Broadway the year before the film came out for 356 performances. Robert Sherwood did the adaption and for the screen, the talents of Casey Robinson were brought in to adapt Tovarich to another medium. Usually these collaborative efforts tend to dilute, but in the case of Tovarich, it's bright sophisticated comedy that gives both Charles Boyer and Claudette Colbert two of their best screen roles.

Boyer and Colbert play a couple of exiled Russian nobles living in genteel poverty in Paris as so many did after the Russian Revolution. She's a bit more noble than he, Colbert is actually a blood Romanov and Boyer only married into the royal family. Before he and the family were overthrown, Nicholas II gave Boyer a lot of Russian gold, smuggled out of the country which Boyer laundered to use the modern term and deposited in a French bank under his name. Although no one could have blamed him for occasionally dipping in just for the bare necessities, Boyer and Colbert have refused to do it.

What they're sitting on it for, who can tell. They refuse an a request for money from another exile Morris Carnovsky for some wild scheme to restore the Romanovs. Boyer and Colbert have woke up and smelled the coffee, the Romanov restoration just ain't happening. But what to do with that money, especially when you're living one meal to the next.

Colbert and Boyer take jobs as butler and maid to a wealthy Parisian family consisting of Melville Cooper, Isabel Jeans, Anita Louise, and Maurice Murphy. Reasoning after all that their former status has acquainted them somewhat with the finer things and how that life should be lived. It takes a bit of getting used to as far as the reversal of stations, but gradually they ingratiate themselves with the family.

The big test comes when a dinner party is given and a Commissar from the Soviet Union played by smooth Basil Rathbone is invited. He's got some history with the Romanovs and things get both funny and tense at the same time. A real achievement for director Anatole Litvak.

Tovarich was also the source of a Broadway musical from 1963 in which Vivien Leigh starred in the Claudette Colbert role.

If you think you've figured out who the good and bad people are than you are in for a surprise. Tovarich takes no sides in the politics, it presents the Bolsheviks and Romanovs with all the warts showing. It does it with sparkling humor as well. Try to catch it when broadcast next.

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.

"Tovarich" was the sort of film Hollywood loved making -- light entertainment, a piece of fluff -- but with a subtle edge lacking in many other films of its era. This is a film that will make you smile, laugh and even choke up a bit. The performances are all brilliant and you would be hard pressed to dislike any character for long, even the 'villain' of the piece. This film even manages to convey its 'message' without being overbearing and destroying the humour. One of my all-time favourites.