Le gai mensonge

As I read other comments about this movie, I wonder if its the same movie I watched. Here is Francis Lederer, smarmy, simpering smile and all, as a prince working as a bell boy in a New York hotel. The movies of the 30's (which I love, for the most part) seem to be full of princes, kings, and assorted rich people masquerading as poor people. I'm sure it was a depression era thing, but the reasoning is beyond me.

Frances Dee is every bit as beautiful as purported. I'm sure she was a capable actress. She is barely believable, though, as a poor girl masquerading as wealthy, via a sudden windfall of 5000 dollars.

As for plot, you get the idea. Predictable to say the least.

This is not the movie to prove Dee's acting ability, though. Benita Hume, Lionel Stander and Alan Mowbry lend a modicum of acting talent to the proceedings, but not enough to save it from being a bad movie.

The reason for an Oscar nomination escapes me.

I love Wyler. People never talk about him regardless of the fact that he directed the best epic movie ever, Ben Hur, one of the best rom-coms ever Roman Holiday, and classics like The Best Years of Our Lives and Funny Girl.

he Gay Deception, like Roman Holiday, is a tale about a royalty wanting to be a normal, everyday person like everyone else. He ends up falling in love with a girl who on the other hand wants to be royalty, if only for one month, after she wins the lottery.

No prize for guessing the ending. But Wyler too knows the audience knows how the story will be resolved - so he makes every joke count. Every meeting is a delightful clash of the opposites, with fast witted dialogue and hilarious performances, especially by Lederer, whom I have never seen this funny.

If you look closely, you will notice small jokes with open references to sex and things impure that the Production Code was against and did not allow. This isn't It Happened One Night, but it's a nice film that will make you smile.

With 20th Century Fox swallowed up by that corporate piranha, Disney, I have a feeling many of these Fox films will be lost to viewing, since I assume Disney wants to hide these in a vault and promote their own stuff. So I've decided to use a list to see some films I haven't gotten to yet.

Frances Dee and Francis Lederer star in "The Gay Deception" from 1935. People would get another idea of this title were it made today. The beautiful, wide-eyed Mirabel (Dee) comes from a town where casaba melons are grown. She wants to let loose and live, but she has to make a living. Then she wins $5000 in a lottery.

The bank tells her that at 4% interest, she can make $3.85 a week. Mirabel is not interested. She wants the money in cash and is determined to have a blast for as long as the money lasts.

According to my research, despite admonitions by the bank manager, that would be quite a while. $5000 in 1935 buys $100,000 of goods and services today. With French hats costing $19.95 and hotel suites back them costing something like $32/day, Mirabel's money will go far even in NYC.

Mirabel takes the Peach Blossom suite at the Walsdorf Astoria Hotel. She arrives with tons of luggage filled with gowns, hats, and furs. However, she is constantly hounded by a bellboy named Sandro (Lederer) who advises her on what to drink, what to order, and where to go, and she hates it and him.

He drives her crazy, but she eventually has to admit to herself she's having a rotten time. She's alone, ignored by the famous society deb in the next suite, and there's a huge ball coming up, and she's not invited.

Sandro promises that she will attend the ball, and with a prince.

One of those light, sophisticated comedies that we won't see again, reminiscent of another favorite of mine, Cafe Metropole. Surprisingly, William Wyler directed, and it's a shame he didn't do more of this type of film.

Both of the stars had interesting -- and long lives.

In 1929, Francis Lederer made "Pandora's Box" in Germany starring Louise Brooks. He couldn't speak English, and she couldn't speak German. Fortunately it was silent. Here he is in 1935 speaking English impeccably and giving a marvelous performance.

Irving Thalberg intended to make him a huge star, but with Thalberg's death, Lederer failed to make Clark Gable status. He worked until 1971 and then opened an acting school; the week of his death, at 100, he was still teaching.

Frances Dee was pregnant with Jody McCrea with her husband Joel when this film was made; two more children followed, the last one in 1955. She stopped working in the '50s with no regrets. She was married to McCrea until his death in 1990.

Some trivia: Selznick considered casting Dee as Melanie Wilkes, but backed off when he thought that her beauty might overshadow newcomer Vivien Leigh. DeHavilland's beauty was more placid; described by James Agee as "one of the very few women in movies who really had a face...and always used this translucent face with delicate and exciting talent," Dee lived until age 94.

Try to tell me Wyler wasn't inspired by Ernst Lubitsch. Go on, say it. If this had starred Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald instead of Francis Lederer and Frances Dee, it'd easily pass for one of Lubitsch's films of the Pre-Code era. It's the story of a suave, European womanizer who falls in love with a largely unassuming American woman with touches of farcical mistaken identity on top. That it doesn't entertain quite as much as The Good Fairy is unfortunate, but The Good Fairy was just great. The Gay Deception is a lighter, less emotionally satisfying confection, but still a small delight of a film that resembles Lubitsch's So This is Paris.

Mirabel Miller (Dee) is a worker bee at a small firm in Greenville, NY with dreams of saving up her money for a fashionable hat, a symbol of living large and having a good time (it was the Depression, so this is obviously wish-fulfillment for the audience pretty much from the get go). She wins a lottery of $5,000 and decides that she's going to go to New York City to spend it all and enjoy herself, even if only for a month. So, she shows up at the Walsdorf Plaza with management thinking that she's some kind of melon magnate's daughter. One of the employees of the hotel is a bellboy named Sandro (Lederer). He's unconcerned with the rules of punctuality and happily backtalks to his superior regularly. He shows up in rooms being made up and just asks to watch the process of making the bed. He's an odd duck, and the talk of the hotel staff.

When Mirabel shows up to the Plaza, Sandro is one of the bellboys assigned to help take her things up to her room, and he continues his pattern of insubordination by sticking around, gently ribbing her when he watches her bouncing on her bed, and criticizing the style of her expensive $20 hat, all in front of a superior who cheerfully fires him in the elevator down.

Sandro's secret, though, is that he's actually Prince Alessandro of the country Alessandro. The Consul-General Semanek (Lennox Pawle) is convinced that the Prince is on a trans-Atlantic ship at that moment, due to dock in a couple of days, and he's in with some nefarious gangster characters for...some reason. I guess it got explained in one line of dialogue, but it's really just an excuse for Semanek to feel panic at Alessandro's not being on the ship. His life is somehow tied up in it. It's enough for the situation, but it's still thin. Alessandro snuck over early, though, because he has some inclination to get into the hotel business, and he had decided to use the Walsdorf Plaza as an example to learn the business. Sure, why not?

The meat of it, though, is the burgeoning relationship between Alessandra, continuing his façade as a working man by getting new jobs at the hotel every time he gets fired (he gets fired a few times to increasingly comic results), and Mirabel who is both attracted to and annoyed by this foreign guy who keeps trying to order for her (like telling her to order a martini when he's a waiter, she insists on something sweet, he brings her a martini despite her protestations, she enjoys the drink, and he smiles because he won). When he gets fired for the final time, he takes her out to dinner at a small Italian restaurant where he gets seen by the two toughs running Semanek, and Semanek sends some people down there to pick him up, to try and mask his identity, forcing Alessandro to abandon Mirabel at the restaurant.

The finale of the film is around a large society dinner at the hotel, run by a snooty lady that revels at the opportunity to invite Mirabel but also insult her because she's obviously not of her class. Alessandro sees through it, and he offers himself in his true identity up as her guest. She resists because he hurt her, and she also doesn't believe him. What makes this whole thing entertaining is a ticking clock element (Semanek and the two toughs are coming to investigate the rumor of Alessandro in New York before the boat) along with the fact that Alessandro snuck in, stealing bits of clothing from other guests in the laundry, to make his entrance.

It's all light and airy and amusing as it plays out. There's just enough character built into it around Mirabel and Alessandro so that their romance feels believable. The minor characters are broadly drawn and fun to watch, especially Pawle as Semanek in his most fearful moments when his hair gets crazed. Lederer is charming as Alessandro, fun to watch as he floats through almost every scene and situation. Dee is fine as Mirabel, pretty much the straight man of the comedic series of setups.

The characters are perhaps too thin for any real emotional connection, and the comic situations are occasionally too contrived to really hit either. However, as a whole, the film is a light treat of comedy from William Wyler in the early days of the Hays Code.

This is the first of a 3-movie tribute (though I own a number of his other efforts that remain unwatched) which I will be undertaking on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of distinguished (if not a personal favorite) director Wyler's passing. Despite an unfortunate title – which, at this juncture, makes it sound like a biopic of Rock Hudson (or even John Travolta)! – this is an unassuming but nice addition to the spate of sophisticated/crazy romantic comedies to emerge during Hollywood's Golden Age (thematically, it recalls James Whale's equally delightful BY CANDLELIGHT {1934}). Wyler would display this kind of light touch only sporadically throughout his career (for the record, my viewing of its not-too-dissimilar predecessor THE GOOD FAIRY from the same year is upcoming), mainly losing himself in significant solemnity thereafter: while this may have won him numerous accolades over the years, it certainly did not endear him to critics who abided by the auteur theory!

Anyway, the central casting here seems second-rate upon a preliminary glance but Frances Dee proves appealingly gauche along the way (as a small-town girl who, having won $5000 in a melon contest{!}, tries to pass herself off as a society woman while on a New York spending spree), whereas Francis Lederer is a revelation: best-known for playing sinister types (as in Jean Renoir's masterful THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID {1946} and the low-budget but inventive THE RETURN OF Dracula {1958}) or suave aristocratic seducers (notably Mitchell Leisen's sparkling MIDNIGHT {1939}), he retains the latter qualities here – in the role of the prince of a fictional Middle-European country posing as a hotel bell-boy! – but invests the character with quick-witted cunning and infectious charm.

The scene is thus set for a multitude of complications: Dee is misguidedly feted by the hotel staff, though still shunned by the true elite (exemplified by Benita Hume – Ronald Colman's wife – and Alan Mowbray) who can spot her modest origins a mile off; Lederer's savoir faire attitude belies his assumed rank (and even lands him in trouble with his 'superiors': forever losing his job, he then has his country's N.Y. embassy pull the necessary strings in order to get him reinstated!), while also initially putting the ingenuous heroine ill-at-ease. The eccentric, child-like ambassador himself (DAVID COPPERFIELD {1935}'s Lennox Pawle) has his hands full trying to keep Lederer's ruse a secret from a couple of investors of dubious morals (Lionel Stander and Akim Tamiroff) – so that, when taking Dee to a ball under his real guise and ostensibly exposed as a fraud, having had to assemble his officious wardrobe from bits and pieces belonging to various people at the hotel (including ubiquitous character actors Luis Alberni and Robert Greig), Pawle cannot vouch for the prince, and the latter is thus thrown in jail! An earnest Dee tries to intervene, believing Lederer had done this grand gesture for her sake…but, upon being revealed for what he really is, she feels used by him and flees in humiliation, intent on going back home. The inevitable last-scene reconciliation, then, is brought on by the simple (i.e. idealized) act of having the hero sneak into the leading lady's room dressed-up once again in a bell-boy's uniform!