"Tonight Is Ours," Paramount's version of Noel Coward's one and only Ruritanian romance (written when he was a mere 22 years of age!) is good enough to hold the interest even in the form of the damaged old print available on Internet Archive. Some stretches are dull but salvaged to a degree by some good acting, fun costumes and elegant sets and furnishings (including a stunning Art Deco telephone). The whole thing is a gossamer light, slick and flippant story about a young couple who meet by chance at a masked ball. It turns out that she (Claudette Colbert) is a princess on the lam from the kingdom of Krayia who longs to escape the strictures of royal life and he (Fredric March) is... well, a wealthy person whose means of support is never addressed in the script.
When this film was made Colbert was in the midst of her meteoric rise to top-drawer Hollywood stardom (she was playing female leads in 5-6 films a year during this period). Early on she is shot from bad angles wearing an unflattering clown costume. In these scenes March comes off as the pretty one. Like Robert Montgomery, Clark Gable and Fred Astaire, he looked dandy in dress suits. And Colbert could look magnificent in Travis Banton's slinky gowns, which she finally gets to wear after the first reel or so.
Too often the script requires Colbert to weep and wail about her dilemma, torn between loyalty to her kingdom and love for March, and while she was highly skilled at bursting into onscreen tears, everything has its limits. Noel Coward's famous wit is only sparsely on display. One line stands out: As March prepares cocktails he says, "You don't need champagne; champagne needs you." But it's hard to tell if it's Coward's line or one by the adaptor, Edwin Justus Mayer.
In a night club scene we hear a fragment of hot jazz music which is identical that which is played on a gramophone in Paramount's "Shanghai Express" when Louise Closser Hale drops in on Marlene Dietrich and Anna Mae Wong in their train compartment.
