Command Performance

So far there is only one other review for this film on IMDb and that writer really, really hated it. While I can understand some of their wrath, I found the film enjoyable despite its deficits. Yes, Neil Hamilton is a big hammy in his acting...they're right about that. And I should point out that this film and the play it's based upon clearly are ripping off "The Prisoner of Zenda", though it's different enough to be enjoyable--and it gives a happy ending you'll never find in the original source material.

Neil Hamilton is acting in two roles in one of the oldest and saddest clichés in films--the notion of identical strangers! It seems that a tiny kingdom is doomed to be invaded unless they can make a marriage alliance by another nearby country. However, the prince is a jerk-face--and couldn't care less if his country is invaded and so he refuses the marriage. Well, it just so happens that there is an actor who looks a lot like the prince (exactly, actually) and he goes to woo the fair princess (Una Merkel).

While the romance seems rushed and the film overly familiar, I like what the film did at the end--creating a very interesting contrast to "The Prisoner of Zenda". I also thought Merkel was excellent and lovely--far different from her usual comical and light roles. All in all, not a great film but an enjoyable one that you can download for free at archive.org.

Neil Hamilton is a second-rate juvenile actor who gets into a fight with co-star Thelma Todd's lover..... who is the Crown Prince of the little kingdom they all live in, and also played by Neil Hamilton. The princely Hamilton has no interest in affairs of state, nor the dynastic marriage his mother has arranged for him, on approval of the object of matrimony. So after threatening the actor with treason, they send him -- the actor, that is -- to woo the princess, played by Una Merkel.

As a longtime fan of Miss Merkel, I was very happy to see this hard-to-see movie. For about twenty minutes. Then it turned out that director Walter Lang could have used a dialogue director, or perhaps a better sound system, because everyone spoke their hackneyed lines as if they were trying to wake up sleeping theater goers in the balcony. The camerawork was likewise primitive, with a lot of medium-length shots, and cutting between medium close-ups when two people had to hold a conversation.

Perhaps my distaste for this example of Ruritanian fiction is largely a matter of having read all of George Barr Mccutcheon's Graustark books -- and enjoyed them for what they are -- and the fine film versions of The Prisoner of Zenda. I confess I have grown tired of these fictional Mitteleuropean principalities, and the vast number of uncanny doubles of their crown princes who show up during a crisis, et cetera. That does not make this movie any more ept.