Les perles de la couronne

Do you know who the granddaddy of the Monty Python was?Sacha Guitry is a serious contender."Les Perles de la couronne" was his biggest commercial success and it's still much fun to watch it today.

It was the first of the "historical" movies of the artist: "Si Paris m'était Conté " "Si Versailles m'était Conté " "En Remontant les Champs-Elysées " were to follow.

Guitry was French wit at its best .Only Henri Jeanson could write as good as he could .His is not a vitriolic style like his peer Jeanson,but a sense of humor completely mad which verges on absurd.

Tell me who could put in a two-hour movie FRancois Premier and Henry the Eighth,Mary Stuart and Catherine de Medicis,Henry the Fourth and the popes,Napoleon and JOsephine,Napoleon the Third and Eugenie de Montijo ,the queen of Abyssinia and Elizabeth the First, Madame du Barry and the Sans-Culottes ,a cuckold and a courtesan, three thieves ,one of them being good at maths and logic,Virgin Mary in the flesh (two divine interventions),and more and more and more....??? Madness is everywhere and critic George Sadoul who would dismiss Guitry as "filmed stage production maker" and "as a man contemplating his navel ,if he were here today,should see his objections swept away in a deluge of joyful film making ,which only the snobs will not hear and only the deaf and the blind will not acknowledge.

The extraordinary quality of the screenplay -which is very complicated ,Guitry really invented here the Film à Tiroirs- is one of simple happiness.You should see Ann Boleyn(sic) teach King François's son the indicative present of the verb "to have" (and the obsolete form "thou hast" )."I need an English teacher too,the king says ,would you be my mistress?".This is a film that should be watched in French with English subtitles to enjoy the word games the puns and the gags which show at every minute .

About King Henry the Eighth:"He protested ,he protested ,he protested so much that he became a Protestant!".

The film is marvelously constructed;Sheherazade could not do better even if she tried her best: Once there was a pope who wanted to get rid of his dear niece Catherine's gallant .He had two invaluable pearls so he asked the young man for five more pearls which he would find around the world: around the world in eighty days or more.The Queen of Abyssinia sequence alone is worth the price of admission.Arletty ,with soot or paint smeared all over her face ,can only speak Abyssinian! So it takes three interprets (English,Italian,French ) to translate the sovereign's mumbo jumbo! When the lad came back,the seven pearls were given as a wedding present to Catherine de Medicis.Four pearls ,through the years ,were preserved,but three of them were stolen.Guitry goes backwards and forwards between the present and the past,with absolute virtuosity.And he even manages to make a "poetic" ending : the last pearl gets back to where it once belonged in a way...

Vive Sacha Guitry!

A delight! This is kind of the film I was hoping to see last year when I watched Guitry's Story of a Cheat, which I had heard about for years prior to its becoming available. I liked that film quite a bit, but there was a tinge of disappointment in that it didn't live up to my expectations. The Pearls of the Crown, though, was just brilliant. Guitry and his wife Jacqueline Delubac play multiple roles throughout a 400 year timespan. In the present they play a historian and his wife. Guitry is telling Delubac the story of the pearls in the crown of England. These pearls came from Mary Queen of Scots' necklace, which in turn came from a wedding gift to Catherine de Medici from the Pope. Guitry tells the story of the pearls' origin, and also of their theft the night Mary Stuart was executed. The four pearls that were recovered from the thieves went into the crown, and the three others were never found. Soon Guitry teams up with British and Italian counterparts and the three of them set out on a mission to find the remaining three pearls. This film moves back and forth through time with the grace of a ballerina. Arletty appears in one of the more outrageous bits of the film, as an Abyssinian queen (and, yes, she plays it in blackface).

I was really looking forward to this, my third Guitry.. I'd liked the other two, and I'm a bit of a history buff.. so it should be a winner...

I almost gave up in the first hour.. I found it very dry and dull... but all of a sudden, once the three were dispatched on their quest, it improved dramatically. There was sparkle, wit and interest that seemed to be missing from the first half (Which felt like a slow plod through history)

Perhaps I just happened to tune in..

So my apologies for the poor '5' score.

Sacha Guitry's movies probably don't show up in college courses on French film. But then again, neither, I suspect, do Marcel Pagnol's, which says a lot about such courses. This movie, Les perles de la couronne, is not a great movie, by a long shot. It is, however, an extremely funny one. It is a whirlwind tour of French history, and the characters going flying by, most without development or even much dialogue. Acting, except in a few magisterial cases (Raimu), is non-existent. What you do get is a brilliant narrative delivered by its brilliant author, Sacha Guitry. He is nothing to look at - though he was married to a succession of some of the most beautiful women in French theater and cinema - but he knows how to read his own words. Cynical to the extreme, but very funny.

Other than that, most of the women in this movie are remarkably beautiful to look at.

And you get to see Raimu in his heyday. What more could you ask, after you've worn out your copies of Marius, La femme du boulanger, La fille du puisetier, and the other masterpieces he made with Pagnol? This is basically an extremely funny history lesson, history as it should be taught but seldom is.

Definitely a movie for everyone, including and maybe even especially for those who have been fed a dull diet of "important" French cinema. The camera work may be nothing to write home about here, but the narration is a stitch.

The best of Guitry's historical costumed romps, this one has a great deal of verve and mischief in its favor, all in the service of a shaggy dog story about a set of pearls destined to find their way onto the crown of England, and the hunting down of the three that didn't. The story takes in Henry VIII, Napoleon and Queen Victoria along the way and ends up a sort of comedic Maltese Falcon.

The constant use of English, Italian and French languages throughout is unusual and perhaps even unique. It does slow the pace down having the same line said 3 times throughout, but, like the rest of the film, it's all done in such a spirit of playful fun it somehow works.