Ambassador Bill

Another of my recent DVD purchases was a box set of Will Rogers movies, in fact Volume 2 from Fox. Recently, I decided to fire up my DVD player and watch one of the discs off that box set, namely the film Ambassador Bill.

Now the first thing I noticed is that the print used opens up with the Fox Fanfare, which was added much later, since Fox and 20th Century didn't merge until a good four years after this movie was released by the Fox Film Corporation. But that has no bearing on the rest of the movie. Rogers plays Bill Harper, an Oklahoma cattleman who has just been named the new American ambassador to Sylvania, one of those fictional countries somewhere in Central Europe (or more specifically in this case the Balkans which pop up in a lot of movies from this era. His job is to help the Americans secure a contract to develop Sylvania's infrastructure, which is going to be difficult given the country's political situation.

As Bill is flying in, he counts the shots from the cannonade, thinking he doesn't merit a 21-gun salute. But then a 22nd shot goes off, and his pilot Lothar (Ray Milland) informs him that the country is going through one of its regular revolutions. You'd think an ambassador would know a bit about the country he's being posted to.

One of the first things a new ambassador is supposed to do is to present his credentials to the country he's representing, and that's where we learn more about the country's complicated political situation. Sylvania is a kingdom, but the current King Paul (Tad Alexander) is only about 10 years old. That means he's got a regent, and the regent is the Queen Consort, Vanya (Marguerite Churchill). However, the real power behind the throne is the Prince Polikoff (Gustav von Seyffertitz), who engineered the abdication of the King.

Wouldn't you know it, but that king is... Lothar, who piloted Bill into Sylvania and then shows up unannounced at the American embassy late one night to tell Bill the "true" story. Bill, meanwhile, has taken a liking to the poor boy king, seeing that Paul doesn't have any chance to be just a boy or to learn how to become a man. In what would seem like a major breach of diplomatic etiquette, Bill becomes a sort of foster father to Paul, teaching him baseball and rope-handling and the like. He also becomes a bit close to Vanya, who still holds a torch for Lothar.

Polikoff, for his part, has cards up his sleeve to play, and tries to entrap Bill with a honeypot, the Countess Ilka (Greta Nissen). This ultimately leads to another revolution. Since it's a Will Rogers film, you can guess which side wins.

Will Rogers was a big star in the first half of the 1930s up until his tragic death in a plane crash in the Alaskan bush, and watching movies like Ambassador Bill, it's easy to see why. He comes across as affable with an easy charm, and his homespun humor is always gentle. Ninety years on, his style may not be to everyone's taste and the material may not have aged well, but I think it's still important to see movies like this to see what America had a taste for in the early 1930s and what the phenomenon of Will Rogers was. Rogers may not have been the prototypical Hollywood star, but a star he most certainly was.