Tovarich

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.

If anyone could see the scene of the Colbert and Boyer serving at a party and not laugh, I would like to meet him. This is a stylish comedy concerning two noble emigrees who are in possession of a Bank account worth 10 billion gold francs, and who sign on as butler and chambermaid to a Parisian couple and the adventures that ensue.

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.

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).

"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.