Command Performance

Neil Hamilton is a second-rate juvenile actor who gets into a fight with co-star Thelma Todd's lover..... who is the Crown Prince of the little kingdom they all live in, and also played by Neil Hamilton. The princely Hamilton has no interest in affairs of state, nor the dynastic marriage his mother has arranged for him, on approval of the object of matrimony. So after threatening the actor with treason, they send him -- the actor, that is -- to woo the princess, played by Una Merkel.

As a longtime fan of Miss Merkel, I was very happy to see this hard-to-see movie. For about twenty minutes. Then it turned out that director Walter Lang could have used a dialogue director, or perhaps a better sound system, because everyone spoke their hackneyed lines as if they were trying to wake up sleeping theater goers in the balcony. The camerawork was likewise primitive, with a lot of medium-length shots, and cutting between medium close-ups when two people had to hold a conversation.

Perhaps my distaste for this example of Ruritanian fiction is largely a matter of having read all of George Barr Mccutcheon's Graustark books -- and enjoyed them for what they are -- and the fine film versions of The Prisoner of Zenda. I confess I have grown tired of these fictional Mitteleuropean principalities, and the vast number of uncanny doubles of their crown princes who show up during a crisis, et cetera. That does not make this movie any more ept.