Delightful sophisticated `continental' comedy (kind of a `reverse' Ninotchka), so entertaining indeed, that when it ends you have the feeling that it moved along too swiftly, keeping you wanting at least 30 minutes more of film!
French born actors, Charles Boyer and Claudette Colbert work together wonderfully well, under Anatole Litvak's very good direction, in this engaging comedy, based upon a french play adapted by Robert E. Sherwood himself, about two penniless members of the highest rank Russian nobility (escaped from the 1917 Russian Revolution) currently living in Paris, who masquerade as commoners in order to be hired as servants of an aristocratic household, full of sort-of-zany and bizarre characters.
Isabel Jeans and Melville Cooper are perfectly cast as the aristocratic couple, Mr. and Mrs. Dupont, who hire them, absolutely unaware of their new butler's and maid's pedigrees. Basil Rathbone, as always, gives an excellent performance as Comissar Gorotchenko, a very `special' guest at a lavish dinner party arranged by the Duponts, one of the funniest (and at the same time, most dramatic) sequences of the movie.
Boyer and Colbert are so utterly charming that one does not wonder why the Duponts and both, their daughter and son, are completely conquered and taken by the `undercover' Royal Russians, Prince Mikail Alexandrovitch Ouratieff (Boyer) and Grand Duchess Tatiana Petrovna Romanov (Colbert), known by them as Michel & Tina.
This was the third and last pairing of its leading stars, who had previously worked together successfully at Paramount Pictures, in `The Man From Yesterday' (1932) and `Private Worlds' (1935).
French born actors, Charles Boyer and Claudette Colbert work together wonderfully well, under Anatole Litvak's very good direction, in this engaging comedy, based upon a french play adapted by Robert E. Sherwood himself, about two penniless members of the highest rank Russian nobility (escaped from the 1917 Russian Revolution) currently living in Paris, who masquerade as commoners in order to be hired as servants of an aristocratic household, full of sort-of-zany and bizarre characters.
Isabel Jeans and Melville Cooper are perfectly cast as the aristocratic couple, Mr. and Mrs. Dupont, who hire them, absolutely unaware of their new butler's and maid's pedigrees. Basil Rathbone, as always, gives an excellent performance as Comissar Gorotchenko, a very `special' guest at a lavish dinner party arranged by the Duponts, one of the funniest (and at the same time, most dramatic) sequences of the movie.
Boyer and Colbert are so utterly charming that one does not wonder why the Duponts and both, their daughter and son, are completely conquered and taken by the `undercover' Royal Russians, Prince Mikail Alexandrovitch Ouratieff (Boyer) and Grand Duchess Tatiana Petrovna Romanov (Colbert), known by them as Michel & Tina.
This was the third and last pairing of its leading stars, who had previously worked together successfully at Paramount Pictures, in `The Man From Yesterday' (1932) and `Private Worlds' (1935).