If I Were King

Ronald Colman gets his wish in "If I Were King," a 1938 film also starring Basil Rathbone and Francis Dee. Colman plays the vagabond poet Francois Villon, who is overheard by the disguised King (Basil Rathbone) criticizing His Highness and talking about what he would do if given the chance. He and his entire party are arrested, and Louis makes Villon the Lord High Chancellor. Villon gets to work immediately and elevates the king's reputation among the people. He opens up the stores of food at the palace and gives it to the citizens - they have no food because the city is being held by the Burgundians. The sentences he passes out to anyone arrested are merciful and fair. It seems as if he has succeeded. But what the King has failed to inform Villon is that he is only Chancellor for a week - and he has that week to convince the French army, who are refusing to fight the Burgundian army, to do so and win.

"If I Were King" is a great deal of fun, and Ronald Colman is delightful as Villon. But first, in response to a previous post, a word about accents. The previous poster asks if there was a vocal coach available, as there were people speaking in British and American accents - no French accents. Hollywood often confuses the accent issue of films set in foreign lands by casting one or two people who have some type of accent while the rest do not. The rule in acting is that no accent is necessary when doing a film or a play set in a foreign country. Why? Because the people of that country are not speaking English. They are speaking their own language. They are NOT walking around France speaking English with a French accent. This is why when actors perform Russian plays, or Hollywood did films set in Nazi Germany, Budapest, Spain or anywhere else, the actors did not have to use an accent of that country. An accent would only be necessary if a German were in America speaking English, for instance.

To get back to the cast, led by the wonderful Colman, Basil Rathbone is excellent as the hated Louis, and Frances Dee is lovely as Katherine de Vaucelles, who falls in love with the Lord High Chancellor.

Someone complained because Errol Flynn did not play this role. Flynn would have been marvelous, as he was a very charismatic actor, but I think Colman is marvelous. His Louis is not only energetic and charming, but highly intelligent, and Colman is able to shade the role in a way that Flynn, who tended to be much more superficial in his characterizations, could not.

An enchanting film, highly recommended.

This is a legendary story about François Villon, the mediaeval French poet and adventurer probably best known in English for his line, « Mais où sont les neiges d'antan? » / "But where are the snows of yesteryear?" Some may recognize the line from Joseph Heller's Catch-22 take-off, "Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?"

As I first began watching this, my immediate reaction was, "What an obvious attempt to cash in on The Hunchback of Notre Dame!", the film whose look and feel most closely resemble this one. But my chronology was backwards. The Laughton Hunchback is 1939. If you have ever seen the Chaney Hunchback from 1923, you may have been struck by how different many of the characterizations are from the more familiar version, especially that of the King. The 1923 French King is a nasty piece of work, just the sort of thinly disguised Napoleon III that Victor Hugo would conceive of. So where did the doddering but dear-hearted 1939 King played by sweet old Harry Davenport come from then? Well, that's easy. From Basil Rathbone's King in this film. They even look the same!

Rathbone, by the way, is completely unrecognizable. If he's played an impish character elsewhere, I've never seen it. He gets most of Preston Sturges's best and most typical lines of dialogue.

Sturges is the reason I was watching the film in the first place. Telltale signs are everywhere in the script, but we definitely do not get effervescent dialogue issuing forth from every mouth the way we expect from the later, classic Sturges films.

I am not a great fan of Ronald Colman ordinarily but he brings a lot of spirit to his part, even if he doesn't have quite the dash of an Errol Flynn. But he does have a lot to do with this film's overall success.

Frances Dee demonstrates once again that she is quite probably the best-looking American actress of the 1930's, although she has all the acting prowess of an Andie MacDowell. (If you insist on talent with your set decoration, then you probably would have preferred to see Paulette Goddard playing the part of the lady-in-waiting who catches Villon's eye.)

Ronald Colman and Basil Rathbone, two wonderful actors having the time of their careers playing wittily written opposites who are also spiritual soulmates -- Francois Villon, the poetic rebel, born into poverty with a noble soul, and Louis XI, King of France, born into privilege but with a rebel's iconoclasm. Add a witty script by that poetic comedic rebel Preston Sturges, who hits all the crowd-pleasing buttons without condescension and no-nonsense direction by Frank Lloyd, and you have a top Hollywood product -- a crowd pleaser with intelligence.

Rathbone is a particular delight. Pre-Holmes, he revels in playing an unprepossessing cynic to whom everyone must bow because he happens to be the king. Colman is doing what he does best, playing an intelligent, superior man, without losing the common touch. A delight all the way around.

Colman was not only good looking, suave, sophisticated, and dashing, but he had a lyrical voice, an absolute necessity for a great actor. Recall the speech and voices of Peter O'Toole, James Mason, Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier: when they spoke, it was not mere prose but verse. So who better to play the poet, Francois Villon, than Ronald Colman, who possessed the voice of a poet.

Ronald Colman is my favorite actor of all time. I loved his performance in this film as well as his performances in "Random Harvest", "The Prisoner of Zenda", "The Lost Horizon", and "The Talk of the Town".

There were other great performances in this film besides that of Ronald Colman. Basil Rathbone's performance as King Louis XI is perhaps one of his finest, and deserving of an Academy Award as best supporting actor, while Frances Dee's performance as Villon's beloved is mesmerizing, the images to relive forever in one's dreams: the perfection of beauty and femininity. And Ellen Drew's portrayal of Huguette is touching without being maudlin.

Great film, great performances. Hollywood at its very best.

"If I Were King" has a lot going for it. Based upon a 1901 play by Justin Huntly McCarthy that was subsequently transformed into a successful operetta by Rudolph Friml, the screenplay for this version was written by Preston Sturges. That means it includes a significant amount of Sturges' unique brand of sophisticated and sly wit. This was early in Sturges' career, before he emerged as a successful combination writer and director. Sturges' later films included such classics as "The Great McGinty", "Sullivan's Travels", "The Lady Eve", "The Palm Beach Story", "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" and "Unfaithfully Yours".

"If I Were King" also included superior performances by two great actors at the top of their game. Ronald Coleman was the perfect choice to play the swashbuckling poet-rogue, Francois Villon. For the benefit of those not familiar with French literature, Francois Villon really was a 15th Century French poet, he really did graduate from the Sorbonne and he really was a petty criminal who seems to have been constantly in trouble with the law. Born in Paris in 1431, Villon is described as having "disappeared from view" in 1463. To this day nobody really knows for sure what became of him, although the presumption is that he came to no good end. However, there is absolutely no evidence that he ever did anything even remotely heroic. Ronald Coleman possessed more than enough swashbuckling charm to carry the role, as well as the mellifluous voice to make the poetry work as few other actors, even in his day, could have done.

Usually known for playing either villains or Sherlock Holmes, Basil Rathbone, was given a rare opportunity to demonstrate his acting virtuosity by playing an aging King Louis IX; the clever, conniving and cynical French monarch who has become known to history as "Louis the Spider". At one point in the movie Preston Sturges has the King self-deprecatingly remark that, "The people of France already have one 'Saint Louis', another would only confuse them".