Sort of "My Man Godfrey" meets "Ninotchka", this is a frothy, entertaining comedy directed by Anatole Litvak, whose Hollywood movies I'm currently working my way through. The plot is pretty contrived, but no more than with other screwball comedies of the time. Boyer and Goddard had been in two movies before, neither of which I've seen, and are very comfortable together playing a now impoverished Russian noble couple, displaced by the revolution to Paris, where they live a literally hand to mouth existence. Boyer is a Russian prince in exile, apparently entrusted by the Tsar with a fortune in Russian currency for safekeeping, Goddard his duchess wife. They live anonymously in a cheap Parisian garret, with a broken bed and Goddard reduced to pilfering foodstuffs from the local market, but they resolutely refuse to tap into the fund to ease their plight.
Instead, they wind up taking jobs as a butler and maid in the grand house of wealthy French aristocrats where they put their reverse-knowledge of servitude to good use by quickly making themselves indispensable to the middle-aged scatterbrain husband and wife at the head of the house and their spoilt young-adult son and daughter. In fact, it's not long before father and son fall for the effervescent Colbert while mother and daughter form separate crushes on the debonair Boyer but things get complicated when a former Bolshevik general now elevated to high-ranking civil status, in the form of Basil Rathbone, turns up to a household soirée thrown by the Parisian couple. Rathbone's character has a stormy history with Boyer and Goddard, having persecuted and prosecuted them back in the homeland, to the extent of once perpetrating torture on Boyer in the past and who now wants his hands on the treasure-trove the couple are safeguarding.
It all comes to a head at an amusing scene where the duo have to serve food to Rathbone and other Russian dignitaries at an evening meal, who, to mix matters up further, immediately recognise their former betters.
While some of the humour is a little forced and the denouement a bit too pat, as the formerly gentrified couple meekly accept their new positions of servitude in Western democracy, once the action moves to Paris, there are some amusing scenes and situations along the admittedly cliched upstairs - downstairs / capital - communism lines.
I like Goddard in almost everything in which I've seen her and was genuinely surprised at Boyer's facility with comedy. I also liked the madcap family who adopt them. Director Litvak shows an equal aptitude for staging comedy in a little-known film I'm rather glad I was able to track down.
