Feb. 01, 2012 - Issue #850: Godot
Edmonton Film Society Winter Series
Cast in crowns
Before the tabloids and entertainment-networks scrounged for dirt behind the dazzle and glamour, Tinseltown's stars were the new royalty. European monarchies and their American heirs joined houses in many '40s and '50s movies, but the "annus mirabilis" for Hollywood's kings and queens was 1956. That was when, a year after being crowned Best Actress at the Academy Awards, Grace Kelly became Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco. She was writing letters to her prince while working on The Swan, in which she played a princess. Her wedding dress was made by the MGM costume designer for that film; her most famous director, Alfred Hitchcock, remarked, "I'm very happy that Grace has found herself such a good part."As the Edmonton Film Society's Winter Series shows, royalty movies could offer indirect investigations of the rags-to-riches American Dream (many have commoners rubbing shoulders with or being mistaken for their blue-blooded betters), indulge female viewers' princess fantasies and revel in theatrical sets and gorgeous costumes. In the 1956 film Anastasia (Feb 6), among thronerooms, opera houses, estates and marching-grounds, Ingrid Bergman plays a young, confused Frenchwoman coerced by a Russian expatriate (Yul Brynner) into passing herself off as the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II.
A year later, another Tinseltown tsarina, Marilyn Monroe, found herself across from acting royalty in The Prince and the Showgirl (Feb 27), when she played an actress who catches the eye of the Prince Regent of Carpathia, played by Laurence Olivier. (The movie was panned; Olivier's dislike of Monroe was shown in the recent, behind-the-scenes My Week with Marilyn.)
Diamonds in this series' tiara include Monsieur Beaucaire (Mar 5)—Bob Hope is Louis XV's barber, escaping a brush-cut with the guillotine to pose as a nobleman in the Spanish court—and Oscar-garlanded The Lion in Winter (Apr 2), with Peter O'Toole as Henry III and Katherine Hepburn as his regal wife.
Two 1937 adaptations of lordly literary lions roar their heads: Anthony Hope's "Ruritanian romance" The Prisoner of Zenda (Mar 19), starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr (son of the first "King of Hollywood"), and Mark Twain's take on the old royal-doppelganger plot, The Prince and the Pauper (Mar 26), with Errol Flynn.
Mondays at 8 pm, Feb 6 – Apr 2
Royal Alberta Museum, $6
Full program at royalalbertamuseum.ca/events/event.cfm?id=120
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