Ronald Colman does comedy

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for quite some time was My Life With Caroline. Recently I finally got around to watching it so that I could write up a review before it expired.

Although Ronald Colman is the star, or at least the male lead, we meet several of the other characters first, at a ski resort in Idaho that's running some sort of charity function. Argentine rancher Paco Del Valle (Gilbert Roland) is at the charity kissing booth with Caroline Mason (Anna Lee) making money for charity. After this, Paco wants to talk to Caroline's father Bliss (Charles Winninger), to tell him that he plans to ask for Caroline's hand in marriage, but that since this is the era when it was common to ask a father for that, well, Dad ought to know.

Of course, there's a minor complication. Caroline is already married, to Anthony (Ronald Colman), a successful publisher in New York City. Obviously the only way Caroline would be able to marry Paco is if her first marriage were dissolved, and Anthony has to be consulted on that matter. So a telegram is sent to Anthony, who has his own plane and is able to get to Idaho. You can see the sort of rich set this movie is about. Anthony gets to Idaho, but doesn't tell any of the other main characters that he's arrived, instead preferring to watch the three surreptitiously. Anthony then breaks the fourth wall, telling us in the audience that he's seen this all before. Caroline is just such a lovely person that other men can't help but fall in love with her. Anthony, however, understands that it's him who Caroline truly loves. And, to that end, Anthony tells us he's going to relate a very similar story that happened a few years back....

Flash back a couple of years, and Anthony is returning from another business trip. His wife and father-in-law introduce him to Paul Martindale (Reginald Gardiner), a sculptor who is "struggling" on $100K a year, and not from the earning of what his sculptures bring in. It's already implied at this first introduction that the relationship between Caroline and Martindale has progressed far enough that he's going to ask her to marry him and that the two might just run off together. And the way the story continues, you get the impression that this one wasn't the first time some guy showed interest in Caroline as Mrs. Mason either.

Eventually, Anthony figures out that Paul and Caroline are going to go off on the same train together, so Anthony maneuvers things so that at least one of them misses the train, which will give Caroline the chance to realize that yes, it truly is Anthony that she loves. And in the final scene, we'll go back to Idaho to see that Caroline and Anthony will live happily ever after, for some values of "happily ever after".

I have the feeling that a director like Preston Sturges would have had a field day with the material. Instead, this being co-produced by RKO, directorial duties were given to Lewis Milestone. The result is a movie that feels off somehow, as though it's all a bunch of conventions that somehow don't work together in the final product. What's supposed to be funny is mostly exasperating, and the characters don't feel like real people.

I guess I can see why somebody like Ronald Colman might want to try his hand at comedy, but My Life With Caroline doesn't do him justice.

Not to be confused with Sayonara

Another one of those movies that shows up on TCM from time to time where I recognized the title, but never watched it, is Cynara. With that in mind, the last time it showed up on TCM I made the point of recording it so that I could watch it and do a post on it here. Eventually, I got around to watching it, writing this post, and scheduling it in the queue of movies to blog about.

The movie opens in Naples, Italy. Jim Warlock (Ronald Colman) is talking to his wife Clemency (Kay Francis), about his desire to get on a boat to South Africa (at the time still part of the British Empire, with the apartheid system still a good 15 years away) since he's badly screwed up his life and relationship with Clemency and needs to leave his native England to put his life back together. But what did he do that's so bad, and why is Clemency seemingly OK with his desire to go to South Africa? As you might guess, we're about to get yet another flashback, as though that's never ever been done in the movies before....

In his native Britain, Jim is a barrister working with his freind John Tring (Henry Stephenson) and married to Clemency coming up on seven years. Theirs is an impossibly happy marriage, and Jim is planning to celebrate their seventh anniversary by buying his wife the sort of jewelry that you only see in the movies that nobody in real life could possibly afford. But when he gets home to give his wife the gift, he finds that things aren't going so well, albeit not through any fault of his or Clemency's. Instead, she's got an idiot sister who chases after men, this time the sort of parachute jumper who might have been a character in the Bette Davis movie Parachute Jumper. Clemency needs to abscond with her sister to get said sister away from this man, and is planning to do so by taking the sister to Venice.

Jim and John are both baching it, so one night they go out to dinner at the sort of restaurant people went to in 1930s movies when they wanted to go slumming, if they were in the class of people who could afford to go slumming. Of course, other patrons are not slumming, like the pair of girlfriends in the next booth, Doris (Phyllis Barry) and Milly (Viva Tattersall). They're sitting in booth next to the one in which Jim and John are sitting, and Doris decides to take Jim's hat on a lark and try it on. So the two pairs are introduced to each other.

Now, as you might guess considering where the movie started, there's going to be a sort of illicit love affair during the time while Clemency is still away in Venice. Jim takes Doris and Milly back to their apartment, where Doris gives Jim their address as well as where they work. Now, Jim should probably have told Doris here that he's already married and that his wife is away for reasons, but he can't be bothered to do that, instead ripping up Doris' address in the taxi. John, for his part, decides to have Jim be the judge in a swimsuit contest where Doris is one of the contestants.

Finally, Jim tells Doris about his wife, but while she claims she can handle it and knows she can never really have Jim, she eventually reacts very badly when Clemency returns from Italy -- by committing suicide. Because of this death under adverse circumstances, there's going to be a coroner's inquest, and the relationship between Doris and Jim is going to come to light. And while it could theoretically be seen as innocent, Jim is a barrister and there is the whole matter of legal ethics....

Cynara is a well-enough made movie, but it's one of those early 1930s movies that, looking back on it 90-plus years on, is badly dated because of how much morals have changed in the intervening 90 years. Colman does a fine job with his role, but for the audiences of 2025, it's a role that we're probably going to find difficult to identify with. Still, for anybody who's a fan of old movies, if Cynara is one you haven't seen before, it's definitely one that's worth watching.

Fate Without Music

I was looking at the upcoming TCM schedule, and noticed that tomorrow, April 7, at 8:00 AM, you can catch the Howard Keel musical version of Kismet. It's from 1955, based on a then-recent musical, with the musical being based on an old stage play from the turn of the last century. That play had already been turned into a non-musical movie on multiple occasions, most notably a 1944 MGM Technicolor production also titled Kismet. I have that 1944 version sitting on my DVR, so I figure that now wouldn't be a bad time to do a post on it.

Thankfully, the movie has some opening narration that greatly helps to explain everything that's going on in the movie. The setting is Baghdad in its golden age, or "old Baghdad when it was new and shiny" as the narrator tells us. Hafiz (Ronald Colman) is a beggar by day who has somehow obtained some fancy clothes that enable him to go out at night disguising himself as a prince, calling himself Prince Hassir. It's as his prince that he makes his way into the palace of the Grand Vizier where he meets the Vizier's Macedonian wife Jamilla (Marlene Dietrich). But we're getting ahead of ourselves here.

Also given prominence in the opening narration is the nominal ruler of the empire, the Caliph (James Craig). The Caliph is smart enough to know that his advisers are going to engage in toadyism and tell him whatever they think he wants to hear, and that those things aren't necessarily going to be the truth. So he escapes from his own palace at night, dressing in regular clothes and passing himself off as the son of the royal gardener. This he does in order to be able to find out what his subjects honestly think. What they think isn't pretty, of course. But this going out at knight is also what brings him into contact with Hafiz as Hassir. One other person the Caliph meets is Marsinah (Joy Page). He falls in love with her, not knowing that she's really the daughter of Hafiz. Hafiz, meanwhile, has been feeding Marsinah a bunch of lies about how she's going to marry a prince and her life will be one of luxury.

Now, as I said earlier, Hafiz meets Jamilla, and is taken with her. The feeling is mutual, although Jamilla is smart enough to know that Hassir is a disguise as there's no real Prince Hassir in Baghdad. After all, the arrival of a prince would be big news, especially in the palaces. In any case, Jamilla is also the wife of the Vizier, played by Edward Arnold. Edward Arnold's casting is a sign that the Vizier is the baddie in the piece. While the Caliph is the nominal power, the Vizier fancies himself as the real power, and he's going to get into a power struggle with the Caliph. He also meets Hassir when Hafiz gets himself invited to the Vizier's place by posing as the prince. This is, unfortunately, going to cause a great deal of legal difficulty for Hafiz when the Vizier figures out the deception. But it also is what really puts the plot into motion for the second half of the movie.

Kismet received four Oscar nominations (which is why TCM aired it -- as part of 31 Days of Oscar) in various technical categories. It's easy to see why the movie picked up those nominations, but not for any of the more traditionally prestigious categories like acting or direction. The movie is certainly lovely to look at, and to be fair to the actors they do a reasonably good job with the material even if none of them look Arab. What makes this version of Kismet a movie that's not as well remembered as other 1940s classics is, I think, the screenplay, which is slow to develop and tends to meander, as if the screenwriters couldn't quite decide what to do.

That isn't to say this version of Kismet is bad. It's more to say that you wonder whether a truly classic movie could have been made from the material. I have yet to see the musical version, so maybe that musical will be the classic.

A Tale of Two Cities (1935)

I've suggested before that MGM was at its best when it was doing things like literary adaptations of classic works. Recently, I got the chance to see their 1935 adaptation of Charles Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities, which is a good example of what MGM could do.

I have to admit that I haven't actually read the book; I was in the section of English classes in my high school that did Great Expecctations instead, so I can't talk about how well the movie hews to the plot of the novel. After a title card with the famous "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" opening, the action shifts to England in the 1770s. A man who works for a bank that has offices in both London and Paris is looking for Lucy Mannette (Elizabeth Allan). She was born in France, but was taken to England and raised by lady's companion Miss Pross (Edna May Oliver) when her father died. Except that Dad (Henry Walthall) didn't actually die, but was imprisoned for years in the Bastille, and has only recently gotten out of prison. So Lucy and Pross travel to Paris to fetch Dad, which is where they meet Madam DeFarge (Blanche Yurka) and her husband.

Since it's early in the reign of Louis XIV, who would of course be executed in the French Revolution a dozen-plus years later, there's a lot of social unrest bubbling under the surface that's going to come out in the later stages of the movie, with the peasants absolutely hating the nobility. Some nobles, however, understand that what the rest of their estate is doing is counterproductive; one such man is Charles Darnay (Donald Woods), who is fleeing for England. That's because he's got an uncle, the Marquis St. Evremonde (Basil Rathbone) who's so nasty that he'd frame his own nephew for treason. He also went after one of Mme. Defarge's relatives as well as Dr. Mannette.

Darnay escaped conviction, however, thanks in no small part to the work of one of his lawyers, Sydney Carton (Ronald Colman). So it's when Darnay is fleeing to England that he meets Lucie, who later also meets Carton. Both men love Lucie, but Lucie has already decided to marry Darnay. And then the French Revolution comes....

The peasants, of course, hate the nobility, and one of them kills the Marquis. This is used to get Darnay to go back to Paris, even though he as a noble, despite one who's changed his name, is going to be in serious danger from the revolutionary mob. Lucie rather stupidly goes with Pross to Paris to try to get her husband freed; if she had never married him she'd probably have been fine, but as the wife of a condemned man she's in danger. Ironically, the person from whom she's most in danger is Mme. Defarge. Who will still be alive after the final reel is finished? Well, if you've read the book you'll probably know, but I'm not about to reveal that.

A Tale of Two Cities being based on a work by Charles Dickens, the story is suitably complicated and long running. But MGM adapts it well, at least as far as I can tell not having read the book. The movie has fine production values, and some pretty darn good performances. Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton is top here; apparently he's always wanted to essay this role. But Blanche Yurka as Defarge and Edna May Oliver as Pross also do well, although Oliver is decidedly more American.

For those who like the always-glittering style that MGM could bring to movies in the 1930s and 1940s, A Tale of Two Cities is a fine example of that, and definitely one to watch.

Condemned (1929)

Ronald Colman was honored in Summer Under the Stars this year, and one of his movies that I hadn't seen was the early talkie Condemned!. So, I recorded it and watched it so that I could do a post on it here.

Colman plays Michel, a French thief who has been exiled to Devil's Island because, well, that's what they did with thieves in those days. On the transport with Michel is murderer Jacques (Louis Wolheim), and the two become friends along the way, because you have to have friends in a place like Devil's Island, or else you're not going to survive.

One person who doesn't have friends is Mme. Vidal (Ann Harding). Of course, she's not a prisoner; she's the wife of the prison colony's warden, M. Vidal (Dudley Digges). He's a fairly tough warden who thinks the only way to keep the prisoners in line is with threats and force. As for his wife, she doesn't really like Devil's Island, because who would if you're a woman who dreams of being at least middle-class. Even if there is a colonial "high" society there I can't imagine being exciting or anything like what life in Paris would be like for the wife of a prison warden.

But since being a prison warden should put you in the higher levels of a society run by colonists, the Vidals need the trappings of that good life, which means the servants. Perhaps there's a prisoner who could be rehabilitated enough to work as the hired help for the Vidals. Since one of the few non-violent prisoners is Michel, who being played by Ronald Colman is clearly much too upper-crust for Devil's Island, he gets the plum job of being servant to Mme. Vidal.

Of course, you can guess what happens next. Bored Mme. Vidal finds herself falling in love with Michel, and the feeling is definitely mutual. This puts M. Vidal into a jealous rage, and he responds in two ways: one is to put Michel into solitary confinement, while the other is to threaten to send his wife back to metropolitan France so she can no longer have the one thing she really wants.

Each of the two plan to escape so that they can meet up with each other in Paramaribo, capital of the neighboring colony of Suriname, which is not a French colony. But for Michel, this means having to go through dangerous swamps in an overland journey, all the while having to stay ahead of M. Vidal's men chasing him. And M. Vidal is bound to learn about his wife's perfidy....

Condemned! isn't a bad little early talkie. Supposedly the filmmakers wanted to do some of the filming on location, although I can't imagine any way that would have happened even if there weren't the technical and financial issues in trying to do it back in 1929. As a result, the jungle scenes seem a bit silly and something that would be technically much superior in a latter-day version. But Ann Harding and Ronald Colman both do well in the new medium of talking pictures, giving good performances. The story is a bit old-hat, probably even for 1929, but it's not old-hat in a bad way.

People who prefer their "old" movies to be from the 1970s may not go in for Condemned!, but for anybody who does like movies of early sound era, it's not a bad choice.

The Zenda prisoner

A movie that, for whatever reason, I had never gotten around to watching, in fact not any of the versions of it, is the 1937 version of The Prisoner of Zenda. It was on TCM in March for 31 Days of Oscar, and so I recently watched it off the Watch TCM app.

To be honest, I sort of knew the basic story. In that great romantic age of the decades just before the Great War, a British gentleman named Rudolf Rassendyll (Ronald Colman) goes on the sort of trip to mysterious central Europe that only the idle rich could afford to do in those days, winding up in some unnamed kingdom roughly where the border of Hungary and Romania would be today. He gets an odd reception, which isn't explained to him until he meets some higher-up military men. Col. Zapt (C. Aubrey Smith) informs Rudolf that he looks amazingly like their country's crown prince, also named Rudolf; apparently, the two shared a common ancestor five or six generations prior.

Curiosity gets the better of everybody, and the two Rudolfs are introduced to each other. British Rudolf does look surprisingly like the Crown Prince, which isn't that much of a surprise when you understand that the continental Rudolf is also played by Ronald Colman. His coronation is supposed to be the next day, but he parties into the night with his new best friend Rudolf.

That's a mistake though, as Prince Rudolf's half-brother Michael (Raymond Massey) has given the prince a drugged bottle of wine. Rudolf drinks all of it and is unable to be roused for his coronation the next day, something that means Michael would be in line to take the throne. So you can understand why Michael would want to commit such a dastardly deed. Zapt understands that having King Michael would be a terrible thing, so he convinces the British Rudolf to stand in for the prince, as nobody will notice the difference. I suppose it's the reverse of Richard Basehart taking off his glasses and putting on contact lenses in Tension.

Michael, of course, knows there's a ruse, since he's the one who drugged his half-brother. Worse than that, he kidnaps the crown prince, so that when the British Rudolf thinks the hare-brained scheme of being a body double for a prince is just about over, it really isn't: nobody can find the prince who is technically a king now.

Even more complicated is the fact that Prince Rudolf has a personal life, and somehow nobody close to British Rudolf who isn't aware of the ruse is able to figure out that these two aren't the same people. This is especially true of Princess Flavia (Madeleine Carroll), another cousin. She's betrothed to Prince Rudolf, but it's more one of those royal marriages of convenience. She was willing to marry the prince out of duty, but she didn't really love him. British Rudolf, on the other hand is different, and while Flavia notices a change, she can't figure out what caused it.

Meanwhile, there's still the little problem of Prince Rudolf having been absconded with and being held somewhere. His supporters are going to have to rescue him, but Michael is no dummy and has made it very difficult for anybody to rescue him.

The plot to The Prisoner of Zenda is frankly a bit daft. But it's one of those movies where you should just sit back and not try to think too much about all the plot holes. If you can do that, you'll find that it's fairly grand entertainment, at least in the fashion of 1930s Hollywood. Everybody involved does a good job, and the story never really stops moving. It's definitely worth a watch.

Lucky Partners

Jack Carson is the star getting 24 hours of his movies played tomorrow, August 30. I think that for all the movie on the TCM schedule tomorrow, I've either blogged about it or haven't seen it yet. However, within the last week or so I watched a Carson movie that seems to have gotten a Warner Archive release but is not part of the Carson lineup tomorrow: Lucky Partners.

Carson, unsurprisingly, plays a supporting role here. Since the movie was made at RKO, the real star here is Ginger Rogers, playing Jean Newton. Jean lives in Greenwich Village with her aunt Lucy (Spring Byington), working at Lucy's bookstore. But she's engaged to Freddie (that's Jack Carson if you couldn't tell), an insurance salesman. That relatively calm life is about to be upended, however. In the film's opening scene, Jean comes across a random stranger, David Grant (Ronald Colman), who wishes her good luck.

Jean decides to buy an Irish Sweepstakes ticket, on the proviso that David spring for half the cost and they split the proceeds should they win. David agrees, but with a proviso of his own, which is that the two go on a trip together should the ticket pay off, as David has some sort of social experiment he wants to undertake and apparently needs a woman for it.

Freddie isn't terribly pleased, and tries to sell the ticket out from under Jean and David when he learns it has a greater potential to pay off (no, I don't understand the workings of the Sweepstakes either), and decides he's going to sell Jean's half of the ticket for a cool $6,000, which was a fairly substantial sum at the time. David in theory still has his half of the ticket, but Jean, apparently thinking that the $6,000 is for the whole ticket, decides to offer half of that to David.

David then decides to do a scaled-down version of the experiment, buying a car in Jean's name and then taking her up to Niagara Falls, where they'll register as brother and sister in separate rooms. Jean agrees, with Freddie eventually following the two of them up to Niagara Falls. As you can probably guess since Colman is billed ahead of Carson, David falls in love with Jean, and the feeling winds up being mutual. But David has a past, and is transporting a painting that may not legally belong to him, winding up in a trial in one of those small-town courtrooms....

Lucky Partners is a movie that I wanted to like more than I did, since the cast is appealing and everybody is professional. But the script does none of them any favors, and the courtroom scene is a particular mess. Most trials don't have sparks, so Hollywood has to create them, with the result being usually less funny than they think. Jean's motives also make little sense, at least in the beginning of the movie.

Still, with a cast like this, Lucky Partners is the sort of movie you'll probably want to watch for yourself and come to your own opinions.

A Double Life

I had always wanted to see A Double Life ever since I saw it on those lists of Oscar-winners, this one for Ronald Colman as Best Actor. TCM ran it back in July when they had Colman as their Star of the Month, and I DVRed it and finally got around to watching it since it's available on DVD.

Colman plays Anthony John, a stage actor who's popular with the audiences as his current comedy, The Gentleman's Gentleman, is a big hit. But we learn already in the opening scenes through whisperings from people who know him that he can be a difficult person to be with as he's very intense and has a tendency to get too much into his characters. Indeed, part of this is why his ex-wife Brita (Signe Hasso) divorced him, even though the two remain good friends.

Anyhow, the current play is going to be closing, as Anthony's producer Max Lasker (Philip Loeb) has a brilliant idea to have Anthony do Shakespeare's Othello. Those whisperings about Anthony's becoming too much like his characters is an issue, but everybody blithely ignores it. Except for Anthony himself, who can't ignore it because he finds that acting and the characters he plays constantly intrude on real life to the point that you'd have to question his sanity. Somebody get this guy a shrink. Anthony even goes off with another women, waitress Pat (Shelley Winters), who notices right away that Anthony is f***ing nuts. It would have been simple enough for him to say that he's an actor to gets a little too much into his characters, but nooooo, he couldn't do that.

Anyhow, Othello becomes a stage hit, held over for months and months, even though Anthony already starts having more issues at the party after opening night. And then during one performance of the climactic scene, one which requires Othello to strangle Desdemona (played by Brita) before killing her with a kiss, Anthony throttles Brita to the point that she fears for her health and a doctor is called in. At this point, the film starts to go a bit off the rails, about which I can't really explain more without giving away major plot points.

It's easy to see why, on watching A Double Life, why Colman was awarded the Best Actor Oscar. Colman is really good, not just at Shakespeare, for which he's got a great appearance and voice; he's great at playing the guy losing his sanity if he ever had any to lose in the first place. But I found the final third of the movie to be fraught with plot holes. If Anthony is going nuts already on opening night, wouldn't it be far worse as the play goes on and on and on? And Shakespeare revivals get that long of a run? Also, a journalist and Anthony's press agent Bill (Edmond O'Brien) both get make ridiculous leaps of logic that are needed to advance the plot. Speaking of Bill, Brita mentions him as her new partner during one of his rages; or, at least, she gives this name to Anthony and a couple of scenes imply Brita and Bill are more than just friends. But when Brita mentions Bill to Anthony in that scene, he acts as though he has no idea who this Bill is!

Overall, A Double Life is one of those movies I'm really glad I finally got around to seeing. Fans of good acting will love Colman's performance, and I'd bet fans of the stage will probably enjoy it too. But it's one of those I won't be going out of my way to watch a second time.

The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo

This morning I watched The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, since it's available on DVD courtesy of the Fox MOD scheme.

Ronald Colman plays Paul Gaillard, who shows up in the film's opening scene at a baccarat table in one of the casinos of Monte Carlo. He bets all he has on a single hand, and wins! He then rides this bet and wins a whole bunch of times, until he's amassed a sum of ten million French francs, which was supposedly a substantial sum back in the mid-1930s. This is enough to break the bank; Paul couldn't play any more if he wanted to because the casino doesn't have any cash on hand to pay out winning bets. All this is newsworthy, and the casino is willing to take the rare loss like this because of the publicity. But Paul points out that his gambling winnings were pure dumb luck and that nobody else should try it. That, the casino can't countenance because it's bad publicity.

Paul returns to Paris, meeting the lovely Helen (Joan Bennett) along the way. He's immediately smitten with her and wants to romance her, but she turns him down at every opportunity, seemingly in part because she's on the train with her brother Bertrand (Colin Clive). Both Paul and Helen have ulterior motives, however. As for Paul, when he returns to Paris, he goes straight to the Café Russe, where it's revealed that Paul is a Russian émigré of noble background, and the money he's won is going to finance the Russian émigré community in Paris, so that they can live in at least a bit of comfort.

Helen and Bertrand, however, were hired by the casino manager. The casino was rather insistent that Paul come back and gamble some more. It's not so much that they wanted to win back all the money that Paul won, although that would be a nice side benefit. Instead, they want him back to undo all the bad publicity over his saying he wouldn't be gambling again and that, by extension, nobody else should be gambling in the casinos either. The casino has hired the lovely Helen to lure Paul and use her sex appeal to get him to go back to Monte Carlo.

Helen does lure Paul to Monte Carlo, in part because of that sex appeal, and in part because Bertrand is so villainous at doing his part of the job. But along the way, Helen begins to fall in love with Paul, not realizing his real past. So she begins to develop a sense of doubt about the job she's supposed to be doing....

When I saw the box guide synopsis of The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, my first thought was of the later Café Metropole. There are certainly some similarities, but also important differences. The box guide listed The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo as a comedy, but I don't think that's quite right, as it's rather darker in tone than the extremely light Café Metropole. That darker tone is something that I think doesn't work in the movie's favor, as it seems to be a bit too serious at times. Still, Colman and the rest all do good jobs with the material they're provided. Even if some of that material is a bit daft.

The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo isn't a bad movie, although I don't know that I'd pay Fox MOD prices for the DVD.

Clive of India

I recorded Clive of India last month when TCM ran it as part of their salute to Star of the Month Ronald Colman. I see that the movie is available on DVD courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme, so I feel comfortable doing a full-length review of it.

Robert Clive (Colman) was a clerk in the British East India Company, which ran the little bit of India it had the power over with an iron first. Clive, however, finds being a clerk tedious and unfulfilling, so he first tries suicide. Then when when the French besiege a British fort he takes up arms, joining the military and finding it something he's good at. Clive's strategies are able to defeat the French, and then ultimately he's able to defeat some of the native rulers as well, bringing more wealth to Britain and also more to himself.

Meanwhile, Margaret (Loretta Young) has decided to travel to India from Britain to see Robert with whom she's been corresponding. She falls in love and the two get married and return to London where they live happily ever after. Suuuure, that's what happened. Since all of this happens in the first half hour of the movie, we know that's not what happens. India slides back into a parlous state since the East India Company is corrupt and brutal, and the Brits need somebody less corrupt and less brutal to manage the place. Clive is the man for the job, and Margaret follows him, somewhat unhappily.

Clive then shows that he was only less corrupt than the other folks in the East India Company, as he's more than willing to forge a signature on a treaty to move things forward. Once again he's successful, but his unorthodox methods are going to get him in trouble. He retires to England again, only for the East India Company to screw things up, forcing him back to India -- although this time, Margaret refuses to follow. Smart woman. And this time, there are East India Company stooges in Parliament. With Clive away in India, they can engage in all sorts of machinations against him.

Robert Clive was apparently an interesting historical figure, but you wouldn't know it from this movie. There are far too many intertitles for a 1935 movie, slowing what little action there is down to a crawl. The scenes that should be exciting wind up being brief battle sequences. Ronald Colman tries his best but has a hard time rising above the poor material. Loretta Young looks radiant. C. Aubrey Smith shows up for a scene at the end. That was Cesar Romero as an Indian ruler?

Ultimately, I'm sorry to say that there's not all that much worth watching in Clive of India. And the MOD schemes always wind up being more expensive than other DVD releases. This one probably deserves to be part of a box set with other Fox period pieces such as Lloyd's of London and not just a standalone DVD.