OVP: The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)

Film: The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)

Stars: Ronald Colman, Madeleine Carroll, C. Aubrey Smith, Raymond Massey, Mary Astor, David Niven, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

Director: John Cromwell

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Art Direction, Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Madeleine Carroll-click here to learn more about Ms. Carroll (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We are going to conclude our month devoted to Madeleine Carroll this week with a movie not too far away from our last film.  Picking Carroll as a Star of the Month was a tossup for me (there were other leading actresses from Hitch's early films that we could've gone with).  She obviously starred in two movies he directed, which lends a lot to her, but Carroll's fame was sharp but brief, and we'll talk about that below, but it also means that there's not a lot of opportunity for growth in her characters & acting style.  This is true once again for Prisoner of Zenda, a body-swapping tale set in 19th Century Austria where Carroll is asked to play the doted-upon beauty.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a man named Rudolf (Colman), who is fishing when he comes across Colonel Zapt (Smith) and Captain von Tarlenheim (Niven), who are shocked by how much he resembles the soon-to-be king, Rudolf V (also played by Colman).  The king is a drunkard, and on the morning of his coronation it is found out that the wine has been drugged, thus Rudolf V cannot be coronated.  Since both of his aides are worried that without Rudolf there, his brother Michael (Massey) will steal the thrown he covets, they put Rudolf in his place, which fools most of the court, though eventually not Michael & his aide Rupert of Hentzou (Fairbanks), but there's a problem-the king's betrothed Princess Flavia (Carroll) is now in love with the imposter king, and before they can switch back, the real Rudolf is kidnapped by Rupert & Michael, with madness ensuing that eventually kills both men, and results in Flavia & the faux Rudolf falling in love, but having to stay apart out of her duty to her country.

The movie is fun, though more fun in the first half than in the second when it gets too melodramatic.  Not all of the cast works (Astor is badly misused as the leg of a Rupert/Michael love triangle), but Fairbanks is delicious as Rupert (I've never seen him this good), completely stealing the film, and I always David Niven (even if his part is small).  Carroll, as I mentioned, is kind of just there-there's a twinkle to her work here, but not much more, and certainly it's not a performance I would've paid attention to were I not looking at it from this angle.  Particularly coming a year after the abdication (in this film, of course, Colman in both the Wallis Simpson role to Carroll's Edward VIII decide that duty comes before love), there are more interesting things to focus on than Carroll's wallflower.

The film was nominated for two Academy Awards.  The Score was the first citation for Alfred Newman, who would during his long career win 43 Oscar nominations, so we will be hearing from him a lot in the upcoming years, and while he wrote some truly brilliant music, this is just fine.  It's the kind you'd expect from a swashbuckler, rousing but not that original.  The art direction is better (this is before Best Costume was a thing, otherwise that likely would've occurred, especially for Fairbanks' sexier looks), and has lots of great-looking sets though there's nothing that stands out as truly detailed in the movie.

As I said above, we will end our chapter focused on Madeleine Carroll here.  The actress would continue working in Hollywood for the remainder of the decade, acting opposite Henry Fonda, Fred MacMurray, Gary Cooper (again), and Bob Hope.  However tragedy would strike Carroll's life early in the 1940's, when her only sister Marguerite died during the London Blitz, and afterward devoted pretty much her entire existence to the war effort and beating the Germans (Dwight Eisenhower purportedly said she did more for the war effort than any other movie star).  This resulted in her eventually winning the Medal of Freedom and the Legion of Honor, but it also killed her career in film.  She'd make only three films after the war (most notably Otto Preminger's The Fan), and spent the rest of her life living with family in Europe, eventually dying at the age of 81 from pancreatic cancer.  Next month we're going to focus on a different actress, one who was a contemporary of Carroll's, but whose career took far different turns (and lasted many decades longer) on the big screen.