Le roi des gueux

Francois Villon, born 1431 was all that If I Were King makes him out to be. Poet, satirist, duelist, and consorter with the rabble of low degree as Brian Hooker's lyric from The Vagabond King, he was all this. His satire brought him some big time trouble, a death sentence. But a last minute commutation by the monarch he satirized, brought him banishment in 1463. Villon went so far into obscurity that we do not know when he died after leaving Paris.

From these facts Justin Huntly McCarthy wrote a popular romantic play that premiered in 1901 and was later made into an operetta with score by Rudolf Friml and Brian Hooker. McCarthy took into account the politics of the time in medieval France. Louis XI was only King for two years, ascending the throne in 1461. The monarchy after leading France to an ultimate victory in the Hundred Years War against the English, was leader of a shattered land with many of the lesser lords quite a bit more powerful than the king. Chief among these in France at the time was the Duke of Burgundy. Whoever held that title ruled an area about a third of modern day France.

It's those Burgundians who have Paris surrounded and are dictating terms to Louis XI when the story opens. Villon and his sidekicks have broken into one of the King's warehouses and helped themselves to some food. Taking it back to the tavern owned by Robin Turgis, Villon makes a few choice comments about Louis XI. Unbeknownst to him, Louis himself is there on a mission to ferret out a traitor among his counselors. The traitor turns out to be the Constable of Paris. When a fight breaks out, Villon kills the constable.

This puts Louis in a dilemma as he sees it. Villon has killed a traitor, but he's insulted the person of the king. Since Villon brags about how much better a job he can do, Louis makes him Constable of Paris and gives him a noble title.

No man on the silver screen ever spoke the King's English better than Ronald Colman. I could listen to that man recite the Yellow Pages. He's a perfect Villon.

Basil Rathbone was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in 1938 for Louis XI. Louis XI was known as the spider king because the man was the craftiest of schemers. He usually had about 5 or 6 options given any situation, most of us are lucky if we have one alternative. Dealing from weakness as he was, he had to be a man of cunning, guile, and deception.

Interesting talking about the King's English when dealing with a pair of figures from medieval France. But the contrast between the romantic Villon and the crafty Louis is what drives the film. That and the partnership of necessity they form and the later grudging respect they develop for each other. Colman and Rathbone have the classical training needed to make If I Were King work.

The two main female characters acquit themselves well. Frances Dee as noblewoman Katherine DeVaucelles and Ellen Drew as the tragic Huguette are just fine. And among the supporting cast, I particularly like Sidney Toler as tavern owner Turgis. It's quite a contrast from playing Charlie Chan.

For me watching If I Were King is like watching The Vagabond King without the music since I know where the songs go. It's like watching a production of Pygmalion after seeing My Fair Lady. You keep waiting for the songs to start.

Particularly I listen for Colman to break into the Song of the Vagabonds as he rouses the citizens of Paris. It's a great moment in both the play and the musical.

You will thrill when you hear Colman rouse that rabble of low degree even if he doesn't sing.

"If I Were King" has a lot going for it. Based upon a 1901 play by Justin Huntly McCarthy that was subsequently transformed into a successful operetta by Rudolph Friml, the screenplay for this version was written by Preston Sturges. That means it includes a significant amount of Sturges' unique brand of sophisticated and sly wit. This was early in Sturges' career, before he emerged as a successful combination writer and director. Sturges' later films included such classics as "The Great McGinty", "Sullivan's Travels", "The Lady Eve", "The Palm Beach Story", "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" and "Unfaithfully Yours".

"If I Were King" also included superior performances by two great actors at the top of their game. Ronald Coleman was the perfect choice to play the swashbuckling poet-rogue, Francois Villon. For the benefit of those not familiar with French literature, Francois Villon really was a 15th Century French poet, he really did graduate from the Sorbonne and he really was a petty criminal who seems to have been constantly in trouble with the law. Born in Paris in 1431, Villon is described as having "disappeared from view" in 1463. To this day nobody really knows for sure what became of him, although the presumption is that he came to no good end. However, there is absolutely no evidence that he ever did anything even remotely heroic. Ronald Coleman possessed more than enough swashbuckling charm to carry the role, as well as the mellifluous voice to make the poetry work as few other actors, even in his day, could have done.

Usually known for playing either villains or Sherlock Holmes, Basil Rathbone, was given a rare opportunity to demonstrate his acting virtuosity by playing an aging King Louis IX; the clever, conniving and cynical French monarch who has become known to history as "Louis the Spider". At one point in the movie Preston Sturges has the King self-deprecatingly remark that, "The people of France already have one 'Saint Louis', another would only confuse them".

Ronald Colman and Basil Rathbone, two wonderful actors having the time of their careers playing wittily written opposites who are also spiritual soulmates -- Francois Villon, the poetic rebel, born into poverty with a noble soul, and Louis XI, King of France, born into privilege but with a rebel's iconoclasm. Add a witty script by that poetic comedic rebel Preston Sturges, who hits all the crowd-pleasing buttons without condescension and no-nonsense direction by Frank Lloyd, and you have a top Hollywood product -- a crowd pleaser with intelligence.

Rathbone is a particular delight. Pre-Holmes, he revels in playing an unprepossessing cynic to whom everyone must bow because he happens to be the king. Colman is doing what he does best, playing an intelligent, superior man, without losing the common touch. A delight all the way around.

This is a legendary story about François Villon, the mediaeval French poet and adventurer probably best known in English for his line, « Mais où sont les neiges d'antan? » / "But where are the snows of yesteryear?" Some may recognize the line from Joseph Heller's Catch-22 take-off, "Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?"

As I first began watching this, my immediate reaction was, "What an obvious attempt to cash in on The Hunchback of Notre Dame!", the film whose look and feel most closely resemble this one. But my chronology was backwards. The Laughton Hunchback is 1939. If you have ever seen the Chaney Hunchback from 1923, you may have been struck by how different many of the characterizations are from the more familiar version, especially that of the King. The 1923 French King is a nasty piece of work, just the sort of thinly disguised Napoleon III that Victor Hugo would conceive of. So where did the doddering but dear-hearted 1939 King played by sweet old Harry Davenport come from then? Well, that's easy. From Basil Rathbone's King in this film. They even look the same!

Rathbone, by the way, is completely unrecognizable. If he's played an impish character elsewhere, I've never seen it. He gets most of Preston Sturges's best and most typical lines of dialogue.

Sturges is the reason I was watching the film in the first place. Telltale signs are everywhere in the script, but we definitely do not get effervescent dialogue issuing forth from every mouth the way we expect from the later, classic Sturges films.

I am not a great fan of Ronald Colman ordinarily but he brings a lot of spirit to his part, even if he doesn't have quite the dash of an Errol Flynn. But he does have a lot to do with this film's overall success.

Frances Dee demonstrates once again that she is quite probably the best-looking American actress of the 1930's, although she has all the acting prowess of an Andie MacDowell. (If you insist on talent with your set decoration, then you probably would have preferred to see Paulette Goddard playing the part of the lady-in-waiting who catches Villon's eye.)

I knew I was in for a treat when I saw Preston Sturges was scriptwriter for this film, which was clever and energetic, but I didn't expect such wonderful performances from both Basil Rathbone (who received an Oscar nomination) and Ronald Colman. I always felt Colman didn't pick up his lines fast enough (at least in his later years), but he's perfect playing the poet François Villon. Colman sounds like a poet whenever he speaks in all his roles! You've never seen Rathbone in any role quite like that of Louis XI. He sounds at first almost childlike, but it is a mask - he's pretty wily and knows what he is doing all the time. The script, of course, is pure hokum. You can't imagine for one moment that a king would make Grand Constable a man who was caught stealing food from the royal storehouse. As Grand Constable, he runs France! The extended scene where he, while hidden, metes out sentences to his friends who were also caught stealing, is pure delight, and very worthy of Sturges. I found fault with Villon's earlier escape, as it was too easy, and with the casting of Ellen Drew in the role of one of the wenches at the Fir Cone tavern, and who loves Villon. There was too much to enjoy in the film so those were easy to forgive. His other love is Frances Dee, playing one of the nobles at court, and she is always stunningly dressed in Edith Head's costumes. The rest of the cast was all first rate, and the Oscar-nominated sets were excellent. Curiously, the film is set in 1463, the approximate year that Villon died at the age of 32. Also, William Farnum, who plays General Barbezier in this film, played Villon in the 1920 silent of the same name as this film.