Café Metropole is one of the odd, original movies you often encounter in this zone. It doesn’t seem to be very well known. There’s almost no historical or critical writing on it. There are some warm, affectionate comments about it on IMDB — they’re fun to read after you’ve seen the film. But I feel it’s a much better and more interesting film than the neglect might lead one to think.
It’s in the Lubitsch zone, a prickly, cynical fin-de-siecle-meets-jazz-age boulevard farce, with plenty of elegantly dressed snobs getting needled, centered around a monumentally fashionable Parisian restaurant. The proprietor, played by Adolphe Menjou, faces a ruinous call-in of a debt that he had previously leveraged by embezzling from his own vault, unless he can persuade a near-penniless American Princeton-grad Alex Brown (Tyrone Power), who owes him big money for reneging on a drunken gambling debt of his own, to impersonate an exiled Russian prince, in order to gain the favors of an American magnate’s daughter. Said self-made millionaire (Charles Winninger) has the usual curmudgeonly common-sense American mistrust of European nobility, but also a strong taste for the luxury and privilege that American money buys. Extractions of restaurant-saving and prison-avoiding wealth by con artists and impersonators should ensue. Alex-Tyrone reluctantly agrees, affects a ludicrous Russian accent, and successfully enchants magnate’s daughter, played by Loretta Young — and is enchanted in turn.
A major turn happens when the real prince Alexis appears — all the while he had been working as a waiter in the cafe — and cannot allow his family’s honor to be besmirched by the masquerade — at least not for cheap.
Tyrone Power and Loretta Young are two of the most photogenic humans who ever walked the earth. Their love at first sight thread is ridiculous, but the sight of them in the frame stops your questions. This would still be an acceptable Lubitsch trick. Power is early in his career, he needs only to look good and be guided, an innocent, dashing, involuntary crook in over his head. Loretta Young is framed like an icon and nothing she does needs to make sense — she sees through Alex’s childish masquerade and doesn’t mind it; she saves him, as she flounces around like a Titania without an Oberon. (And Tyrone will never, ever become an Oberon.) Like many rich young screwball heiress-heroines she never really relinquishes her hold on the comic phallus.
That said, Café Metropole doesn’t feel like Lubitsch. I don’t know much about Griffith as a director yet; whatever he’s doing in this film is unobtrusive. He’s making the story clear, which isn’t easy. It’s full of cons and tangles. It’s the script that’s most interesting, not the cinematics. The original story was by Gregory Ratoff, who was an actor and an under-respected director himself, deep in the European exile theatrical network. (He cast his friends Peter Lorre and Eric von Stroheim in I Was An Adventuress.) Ratoff is also an actor in this film and almost steals it with his performance as the true Russian prince with fungible honor. The script was written by Jacques Deval, who became a respected French writer and director. (That same year Anatole Litvak directed another of Deval’s plays on a similar theme, Tovarich.) One gets the feeling that Ratoff and Deval may have had a Wilder-Brackett-like relationship going on with this film. The tone is so cynical in so many different registers that the cynicism almost cancels itself out. There’s the Menjou dimension: everyone can be bought, bribed, or blackmailed, but one must do it in style, gracefully. There’s the Ratoff dimension: aristocrats are really just pretentious peasants from the shtetl, with privileges. And there’s the American dimension, voiced by Loretta’s father: “I don’t trust royalty. If they’re charming, they’re fakes. If they’re authentic, they’re stupid.”
But unlike Lubitsch — who ventures into the Czarist-aristocracy-in-luxurious-Parisian- exile game a couple years later with Ninotchka — the comedy in Café Metropole feels edgier. A lot of it comes from the presence of Ratoff’s authentic Prince Alexis. The prince is an intense parody of a Russian aristocrat fiercely jealous of his honor, but actually more interested in getting some dividends.
There’s a great scene when Ratoff and Menjou face off.
There may be an extra piquancy in this set up. Menjou was often cast as the impeccably dignified and elegant European patron. His bearing, his moustache, his facility with several European languages, his dignified manners, and maybe especially his perfect French name, endowed him with the aura of natural continental gentility. But in fact, though he did have a French father (a restaurateur, as it happens), there’s as much Indiana in Menjou as there is Paris. Menjou and Ratoff are having fun with diegetic and non-diegetic impersonations both. (This trope of bogus exiled royalty is still funny for Mittel-Europeans. Even in my youth as late as the 1960s the elegant balls in New York and Washington were thick with young men with genteel manners pretending to be princes in order to charm the debutante daughters of the American millionaire rubes.)
It’s always surprising to me to see Loretta Young as a free spirited fashion plate. She had her own television show when I was a kid, and she generally played sterner, primmer, more melodramatic roles in it. In Café Metropole, she’s affecting a little Carole Lombard thing, but only a little, since Young’s characters never really lose control. Tyrone Power played in a number of comedies after this one. To my taste, he wasn’t ever very good — that signature moodiness of his was probably real, and I often feel he’s not having fun when he’s acting. But here he is having fun — and film is having plenty of fun at his expense. There’s a cute scene in a haberdashery, when Alex-Tyrone is being fitted for a new hat (at the insistence of Titania). The later Power would never be allowed to suffer such indignities. But he’s into it here. (Note how the haberdasher sells his phallus back to him.)
I’m not sure where Café Metropole fits in the historical pattern of comedies of this era, but it’s a good one.