by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I showed Charles The Royal Bed, an RKO movie filmed in 1930 and released in January
1931 recently shown on Turner Classic Movies as part of a “Star of the Month”
tribute to Mary Astor. I hadn’t anticipated much from this movie — it was an
RKO production from the studio’s first three years, when William LeBaron was
production chief, and most of the RKO films in those early days were
overstuffed soap operas. But the film turned out to be unexpectedly stylish,
partly because it had a distinguished literary source — a play by Robert E.
Sherwood called The Queen’s Husband (apparently
it was remade under its original title in 1946 as an early-TV production by the
BBC), which was premiered in 1926 and (like The Road to Rome, premiered a year later but not filmed until MGM used
it as the loose basis for an Esther Williams musical called Jupiter’s
Darling in 1955) showing Sherwood the
political satirist, an odd twist for him as a writer. Sherwood’s play was
adapted for film by future RKO director J. Walter Ruben into a vehicle for Lowell
Sherman, whom I’d been aware of as both actor and director, but I’d never
before seen him do both in the same movie. As an actor he was best known as the
seducer in D. W. Griffith’s melodrama Way Down East — S. J. Perelman joked that in that role “they had
to spray him with fungicide between takes to keep the mushrooms from forming on
him” — and as the alcoholic director who discovers Constance Bennett and makes
her into a star in the 1932 RKO film What Price Hollywood?, essentially the first version of A Star
Is Born. As a director his best-known
credits were from 1933, She Done Him Wrong and Morning Glory — but
both of those films were vehicles for strong-willed female stars, Mae West and
Katharine Hepburn respectively, and it’s still always struck me as unjust that Hepburn should have
won her first Academy Award for Morning Glory and not for the two films she made on either side of
it, Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher Strong and George Cukor’s Little Women, whose stronger directors got far better, subtler and more nuanced
performances out of her. I was rather expecting The Royal Bed, given the title, to be a Lubitsch-esque farce about
royals, nobles and commoners popping in and out of each other’s beds — in fact
no bed, royal or otherwise, appears in the film, and all the
romantic/marital/sexual relationships depicted are purely proper ones that
would have passed muster even under the stricter Production Code enforcement
that came in in 1934.
Lowell Sherman both directs and stars as King Eric VIII —
exactly what country he’s king of
is carefully unspecified, though it’s clear it is in continental Europe — who’s
supposedly an absolute monarch (though there is a Parliament and there are
elections) but is really a well-meaning but ineffectual oaf. The real powers
behind the throne are Eric’s queen, Martha (a marvelous Margaret Dumont-esque
performance by Nance O’Neil) and the prime minister, General Northrup (Robert
Warwick), who’s using the threat of a republican revolution to conduct a reign
of terror, executing political prisoners, shelling the people and ultimately
assuming absolute dictatorial powers. (One imdb.com reviewer suggests that the
film might have been inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution, but Mussolini’s
March on Rome that initiated Italian fascism in 1922 seems a closer parallel to
me.) The revolution is led by Dr. Fellman (Frederick Burk) and his assistant
Laker (J. Carrol Naish — though the first initial is left off his credit —
who’s made up to look more than a bit like Trotsky). The other main intrigue
concerns the king’s daughter, Princess Anne (Mary Astor, dressed in a
masculine-looking suit and tie 47 years before Diane Keaton created a fashion
trend by wearing a man’s necktie in Annie Hall), who is about to be subjected to an arranged marriage
(arranged by the Queen and Northrup, natch) to Prince William of Grec (Hugh
Trevor) — the name of his country is pronounced “Grecque,” like the French name
for Greece — even though the man she’s really in love with is the king’s
secretary, Freddie Granton (Anthony Bushell). But the status-conscious Queen
doesn’t think it’s appropriate for Granton to marry her daughter because his
dad is a plumber (“a wholesale
plumber,” he keeps stressing in the dialogue, and one who’s done well enough
he’s actually a major contributor to Northrup’s election campaigns). King Eric
passes his time playing checkers with his assistant Phipps (Gilbert Emery)
while his wife goes to America to get a loan for their country. When she
returns the revolution is in full swing, and Eric offers to sneak his daughter
and Freddie out of the country so they can be married and she won’t have to wed
the stuck-up Prince William (established as a rotter with a “thing” for chorus
girls) — but with the palace literally under attack she refuses to leave.
Realizing that Northrup is the real danger, the King refuses to sign the
execution orders, performs the wedding ceremony between his daughter and
Freddie himself, sends them out of the country on a tramp steamer to South
America, fires Northrup and settles the revolution by appointing Fellman his
new prime minister.
The Royal Bed
is an appealing farce with satirical elements, and it’s a measure of Sherwood’s
(and Ruben’s) creativity that even hardened movie-watchers aren’t sure how it’s
going to turn out. It’s also well acted — as I’ve noted in these pages before,
films directed by actors tend to have quiet, understated performances even if
the actor-directors were unmitigated hams as actors (like Erich von Stroheim
and Orson Welles) — with Sherman getting a quite fine comic performance out of
himself and a gutsy one out of Mary Astor, even if she does come in speaking so breathlessly we can’t help but
think she’s about to tell us she’s been a bad woman, worse than we could know. The
Royal Bed is a genuine surprise, a little
gem hidden in the dreck of most of RKO’s early output, and one gets the
impression it influenced the creators of the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup — also a satire about a mittel-Europan country featuring revolutionaries and pointless
wars: among the gags from The Royal Bed that turn up in Duck Soup
are the revelation that General Northrup has his troops firing on each other
instead of the enemy, the bomb from the opposing side that pokes a hole in the
palace wall even though it otherwise does little damage, and even a lingering
shot of the Queen staring in a mirror (though it’s a real mirror with a real
reflection, not an empty frame with someone on the other end impersonating
her). It’s the sort of nice movie from the days of the studio system that makes
exploring Hollywood’s lesser-known output worthwhile and makes one grateful for
the existence of TCM.
