Prince sans amour

J. Farrell MacDonald is negotiating to lend King Thomas Jefferson enough money to keep his money afloat, but feels that the Crown Prince, George O'Brien, should be married or engaged to make him and the dynasty more popular. The trouble is he isn't interested in anything without a carburetor. So the two old gentlemen head off to Paris to find a woman to jump-start his interest and come back with Virginia Valli, set her up with clothes and money and offer her a big bonus if she succeeds. However, the prince's cousin, William Powell -- the rotter! -- interferes with their plans...

It's the sort of story that I might have expected to have seen from Paramount in this period, and Hawks is working with much surer comic performers in uncredited support, like Hank Mann and Henry Armetta. He has established a nicely moving camera under William O'Connell and has some fine comic sequences -- Miss Valli is discovered in a bar in Montmartre where she pretends to kill her boyfriend with a knife to give the tourists a thrill. Even more, he establishes the characters' personalities in single shots and offers a series of "meet cutes". It's only a year since he had first taken up the megaphone, but Hawks is already an assured director of a superior genre movie. His next would be the first of the same story he would tell time and again over more than forty years, A GIRL IN EVERY PORT.