Monsieur Beaucaire (Paramount, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday afternoon at 5 I put on Turner Classic Movies for a run of three films, two of them starring Bob Hope: Monsieur Beaucaire (1946) and Caught in the Draft (1941). Monsieur Beaucaire began life as a 1900 novel by Booth Tarkington, which was later turned into an operetta by French composer André Messager and had been filmed at least once before this, a 1924 silent version with Rudolph Valentino in the title role, a barber at the court of King Louis XV who’s mistaken for a nobleman who’s supposed to make a royal marriage with a princess of Spain. Just what possessed Paramount to green-light a movie with Bob Hope, of all people, remaking a Valentino role is uncertain, but Monsieur Beaucaire the remake is a very funny film even though it suffers from anachronistic references to rifles and guillotines, neither of which existed in Louis XV’s time. It also suffers from Paramount’s decision to film it in black-and-white; ordinarily I don’t find myself wishing that films from the classic era that could have been shot in color weren’t, but this time I did. I ached to see all those splendid costumes and splendiferous sets in color, and I didn’t get the chance – even though Sam Goldwyn had made Hope’s previous historical spectacular, The Princess and the Pirate (1944), in color.

Monsieur Beaucaire was adapted for Hope’s purposes by two of his usual coterie of writers, Melvin Frank and Norman Panama, and directed by the ever-reliable George Marshall in the same year Paramount inexplicably gave him the directorial reins on Raymond Chandler’s one original screenplay that was actually produced, The Blue Dahlia. Marshall was a first-rate comedy director who was clueless about how to make a film noir – even a spoof; when Hope actually did spoof film noir in My Favorite Brunette (1947) they assigned Elliott Nugent to direct, and though he was no great shakes as a noir director either, he showed far more sympathy for the genre than Marshall had. In Monsieur Beaucaire Marshall is in his element even though it’s pretty much a one-joke movie: the hapless Hope is obliged to impersonate the Duc le Cnandre (Patric Knowles), who has been ordered by King Louis XV (Reginald Owen) to marry Princess Marie of Spain (Marjorie Reynolds, wise-cracking reporter in the last three Mr. Wong movies at Monogram and then leading lady to Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire in the bog-budget Irving Berlin musical Holiday Inn).

Hope’s love interest in the film is Mimi (Joan Caulfield, who by coincidence was leading lady to Crosby and Astaire in their other co-starring vehicle, Blue Skies), a scullery maid recently given a promotion to chambermaid, which she hopes will allow her to seduce Louis XV and get him to ghve her a castle, or at least keep her in the style of his current mistress, Madame de Pompadour (Hillary Brooke). Midway through the film Louis exiles Beaucaire and Mimi to Spain, where Beaucaire hitches a ride with the Duc and is obliged to dress in the Duc’s clothes to foil an assassination plot by the villain of the piece, Don Francisco (Joseph Schildkraut). Don Francisco is trying to sabotage the royal marriage and thereby start a war between Spain and France, in the hope of usurping the Spanish throne in the resulting chaos. By authorial fiat (Frank’s and Panama’s,not Tarkington’s; in his novel Beaucaire is actually a nobleman in disguise), the Duc and Marie meet and fall in love even as both complain that they’re being forced to marry someone against their will, and someone who will probably turn out to be (as Anna Russell put it) “excessively unattractive.” In the end, of course, Don Francisco’s plot is foiled,the marriage takes place as scheduled, and Beaucaire is reunited with Mimi and the two of them head for the United States – or the United Colonies, as they were then – and Beaucaire ends up as barber to George Washington.

The final shot is of Beaucaire’s and Mimi’s first child, who is played by Bob Hope in a baby’s rocker built in giant size – most likely the work of uncredited gag writer Frank Tashlin, who’d made his reputation in the Warner Bros. cartoon department where he’d studied the Laurel and Hardy movies for inspiration. The scene is straight out of the 1930 Laurel and Hardy film Brats, in which the two had dual roles as fathers and baby sons, courtesy of giant-sized sets Hal Roach’s design crew built. I had originally turned this on hoping to see the Valentino version – that’s what TCM had announced on their schedule – but it was not to be. Still, the 1946 Monsieur Beaucaire was a very entertaining film even though it was pretty much just a normal Bob Hope comedy dressed up as a period piece. One thing that surprises me about this movie is how good Patric Knowles is; he got his start in films playing Errol Flynn’s younger brother in Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) and then ended up under contract to Universal, where he got cast in a wide variety of roles from the harried movie director in Olsen and Johnson’s Crazy House (1943) to the mad scientist Dr. Mainwaring (Baron Fraknkenstein’s son-in-law) in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (also 1943, with Bela Lugosi as the Monster). Given more sensitive handling, Knowles could and should have become a major star. Also,there are enough songs (three) in Monsieur Beaucaire to qualify it as a musical, and the best one os Knowles’ spirited rendition of “A Coach and Four,” written (like the other two songs here) by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, It’s possible he had a voice double – though the singer sounds so much like Knowles’ speaking voice I’m almost certain it’s his own – and though he’s no Nelson Eddy he compares favorably to Don Ameche’s singing of “Voilà, Voilà, Voilà” in another spoof of a story set in old France, the 1939 version of The Three Musketeers with The Ritz Brothers – and “A Coach and Four” is a considerably better song.