by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched a rather interesting movie
from 1931, billed on imdb.com as being made by “James Cruze Productions”
(though, alas, Cruze, one of the most underrated directors of the silent era, didn’t direct this one — the young Walter Lang did) and
released through Tiffany Pictures. The original title was Command
Performance, and it was based on a
short-lived (only 29 performances) Broadway play by Stafford Dickens (no
relation, I presume) that shamelessly ripped off The Prisoner of
Zenda (which when this movie was made had
already been filmed twice as silents — including a 1922 version directed by Rex
Ingram and starring Ramon Novarro — but which wouldn’t be made as a talkie
until the superb David O. Selznick production from 1937, starring Ronald
Colman). The play used the names of real Eastern European countries or
provinces — the prince at the center of the action, Alexis (played in the movie
by Neil Hamilton), is from Moldavia and his father, the Moldavian prince
consort, wants him to marry Katerina (a surprisingly non-comic Una Merkel),
princess of Wallachia, to cement an alliance against a well-armed foreign power
who will conquer Moldavia if it can’t find an ally. (The real Wallachia is one
of the three provinces, along with Moldavia and Transylvania, that make up
modern-day Romania; Wallachia was also where the 15th century king
and warlord Vlad Tepes Drakulya ruled and reportedly beheaded and impaled over
100,000 victims to keep himself in power; he was the historical character on
which Bram Stoker based his vampire Dracula — the name a corruption of the
Romanian “Drakulya,” meaning “Little Dragon,” since Vlad’s father had called
himself “Drakul,” or “Dragon” — only he misread the historical sources and
located Dracula’s origins in Transylvania, and many writers who’ve adapted the
Dracula story have compounded the error by locating Transylvania in Hungary!)
For the movie, however, screenwriters Maude Fulton and Gordon Rigby changed the
names of the countries from the real Moldavia and Wallachia to “Serbland” (at
least that’s what Charles and I thought we heard on the soundtrack on a download — from a reissue print that
changed the title of the movie to He’s a Prince! — and Charles looked up “Serbland” on his
smartphone’s Web connection and found it’s the name of a region in Montenegro,
which made both of us chuckle at the thought that a country as small as
Montenegro could have “regions”) and “Cordovia,” respectively.
Anyway, the plot
is about an actor in Serbland (or whatever it’s called) named Peter Fedor (Neil
Hamilton), who’s arrested by Serblandian police in full Ruritanian palace guard
gear while rehearsing his latest production. It turns out the cops want him
because on his way to the rehearsal he saw a man accosting his co-star and
girlfriend Lydia (Thelma Todd, who is fine but regrettably disappears after the
opening scene), and hit him. Alas for Peter, the man he hit was Prince Alexis,
who’s a notorious skirt-chaser but for some reason finds Katerina, the woman
his parents want him to marry,
too repulsive to go through with the deal. So Queen Elinor has the Prince
imprisoned, and her husband and his justice minister threaten Peter with a
likely lethal term of imprisonment at hard labor in the salt mines. Then they
notice the striking resemblance between Peter and Prince Alexis, so they decide
to make Peter an offer he really can’t refuse: if he doesn’t want to go to the
salt mines, he can go to Cordovia, make Katerina fall in love with him, and
ready her to marry the prince. (One imdb.com reviewer lampooned this movie and
its prototype, The Prisoner of Zenda,
for basing their central premises on the idea that two people growing up miles
away from each other and with no discernible family ties should be such exact
doubles of each other that they can be played by the same actor, but there’s a
bit of passing dialogue in Command Performance that suggests Peter is actually the illegitimate son
of Queen Elinor and therefore the prince’s half-brother. Zenda too explained the resemblance between the royal and
his impersonator through an illegitimate birth, but even though it took place
generations earlier than the main action, Selznick’s 1937 version got the
Production Code censors riled up in an era of tighter enforcement than
prevailed when Command Performance
was made in 1931.) When he gets to Cordovia Peter is greeted with open arms by
King Nicholas (Albert Gran), a man whose sole hobby is cracking and eating nuts
(which suggested to me he’d be more at home ruling Klopstokia, the mythical setting
of the 1932 Million Dollar Legs —
yes, Command Performance is the
sort of mediocre movie that keeps reminding you of great ones), and his queen,
Elizabeth (Vera Lewis) — but Katerina herself has his doubts about him and
really doesn’t want to marry a man just to cement a political alliance.
As if
that weren’t enough jeopardy for Our Hero, he also has to worry about the prime
minister, Duke Charles (Mischa Auer in one of the marvelous slimy-villain
performances he turned in during the early 1930’s before he got “typed” as a
comic actor), who’s killed every previous suitor for Katerina’s hand and is out
to kill the prince because he’s an isolationist who doesn’t believe Cordovia needs any entangling alliances that might get the country
involved in other people’s wars. Of course, he also wants to marry Katerina
himself and become king, or at least prince consort, of Cordovia and the real
power behind the throne — and I couldn’t help but quote the lines from
Lubitsch’s The Love Parade in
which the courtiers complain that no one really wants to be the prince consort
because “he has nothing to do” — to which Eugene Pallette, in his unmistakable
gravelly voice, said, “Well, he does
have something to do” (i.e., fuck
the queen to produce an heir to the throne). You see what I told you about Command
Performance being a mediocre movie that
keeps reminding you of great ones? Indeed, at one point there was a grand scene
in which the entire court of Cordovia is assembled to give the (supposed)
prince a formal greeting, and all I could think of was Duck Soup; I said, “Where was Groucho Marx when this film
needed him?” The story progresses doggedly along the Prisoner of
Zenda plot template until the ending, when
the formal wedding of Prince Alexis and Princess Katerina is about to take
place — even though Peter has already “outed” himself to Katerina and she’s
hopelessly in love with the actor and is willing to marry the prince and even
have sex with him, but has no feeling for him whatsoever. Then Alexis
disappears from the action, leaving his parents a note which says that he
realizes the princess doesn’t love him and he doesn’t really want to be a king
anyway, so he’s renouncing all rights to the Serblandian throne and leaving the
country. There’s only one thing to do: the queen and her consort persuade Peter
to take Alexis’s place permanently, marry Katerina and rule the combined
kingdoms of Serbland and Cordovia once their currently existing monarchs croak.
This happy ending is hardly as moving as the bittersweet one of The
Prisoner of Zenda, but it works for a film
that’s surprisingly good for a 1931 indie even though Lang was still directing
like it was 1929, allowing his actors to deliver their lines in a stage-bound
manner and having them pause between their cue lines and their own lines.
(Those maddening pauses were among the reasons a lot of critics in 1929 thought
silent films were more naturalistic than talkies.) Though the budgets of James
Cruze Productions and Tiffany Pictures didn’t allow for any shots showing both
Neil Hamilton characters in the same frame (compare to the dazzling on-screen
meetings between the two Ronald Colmans in the 1937 Zenda), remember that this was first done as a play and
having Alexis and Peter meet onstage would have been impossible there, too.
Producer Cruze and director Lang artfully use stock footage (most likely
newsreels of actual weddings from the Austro-Hungarian Empire or some of the
countries that derived from it after it was on the losing side in World War I)
to make their movie look more impressively budgeted than it was, and they were
also quite good at finding standing sets — including the veranda shown in the
opening sequences (one of those frame-breakers in which it looks like Peter and
Lydia are really Ruritanian royals, and then the camera pulls back and reveals
they’re only rehearsing a play), which I’ve recognized from several Paramount
films, including the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business (there, I’m doing it again! I’m citing an
acknowledged classic Command Performance reminds me of). Even at just 1 hour and 11 minutes, Command
Performance drags a little, and of course
it wins no points for originality (one almost wishes they’d gone whole-hog with
the resemblance and spoofed The Prisoner of Zenda instead of ripping it off “seriously”), and of
course Neil Hamilton can’t hold a candle to either Ramon Novarro or Ronald
Colman, but Command Performance
is still a charming movie in its own right and the performances of Merkel and
(briefly) Todd are especially treasurable in roles quite different from the
ones we’re used to seeing them in.
