It’s back to Ruritania for Day 4: a slice of slapstick with Stan Laurel for starters, then a main course of Germano-Swedish romantic comedy…
Rupert of Hee Haw (1924; US; Percy Pembroke)
“The Plot”, explains the opening title: “A Princess is engaged to marry a king—but she loves another—This makes it an original story.” Stan Laurel plays a sozzled King, together with the lookalike who brings chaos to the court…
All the Ruritanian trappings are here: the uniforms, the palace sets, the tapestries, suits of armour etc. In fact, the settings have the best recurring jokes. When the King is drunk, the set itself behaves as if drunk: a wall moves back and forth to confound him, then acts as if it was innocent. When the King shoots the cuckoo clock, the suit of armour raises its arms in shock. When the King reappears later in the film, another suit of armour thumps him unconscious. And all for no apparent reason. The King’s fiancée, the Princess, gets her own recurring gag: whenever she is slapped on the back or knocked over, huge clouds of powder (or dust) billow from her clothing. It’s as if she’s fossilized, or she’s wearing a museum costume.
The chaos spreads through the court. A general’s hat reacts every time the King sneezes. First the hat leaps into the air. So the General takes off the hat. The King sneezes and the hat’s plume leaps into the air. The General re-affixes the plume. The King sneezes and the General’s hair leaps into the air. What’s wonderful is that the General looks so nonplussed at each turn, turning around as if to spot how the gag’s being done.
The film takes apart every social formality it can get its hands on. Displays of etiquette become slapstick routines: lines of saluting courtiers turn into front-facing, sideways-kicking brawls. Signs of rank are treated with contempt, articles of uniform defaced and used against their owners.
I quickly lost sense of what the plot was, and so did the film. It swiftly becomes a chaos of banana skins, pratfalls, abrupt changes of fortune, arse-kicks, bits-with-a-dog, incompetent duelling, and callous announcements of deaths and misfortunes. There’s a subplot involving a letter but frankly I had no idea what was supposed to be happening. For Rupert of Hee Haw, the Ruritanian genre is merely a fancy-dress box into which the performers dive and emerge in a chaos of tropes. For only 23 minutes, it feels rather baggy—like the costume doesn’t quite fit the film.
Hans Kungl. Höghet Shinglar / Majestät Schneidet Bubiköpfe (1928; Swe./Ger.; Ragnar Hyltén-Cavallius)
Nickolo Grégory is an aspiring young barber, raised in the trade by his grandfather André. He falls for Astrid, the granddaughter of hair tonic millionairess Sophie Svensson. The millionairess thinks her granddaughter should marry Count Edelstjerna, the closest thing to royalty she can find. But André has a secret, which is that Nickolo is the long-lost Crown Prince of the kingdom of Tirania—and a king worthy of Astrid (and her grandmother). But how will they reclaim the crown, and can they trust the agents sent to help them?
This is an absolutely charming film. It has a charming script, a charming cast, charming performances, charming photography. Its lightness of touch was a very pleasing change from yesterday’s feature, Profonazione, as was its sophisticated staging and camerawork: nothing showy, but imaginative when needed and making the most of its resources.
I’ve commented on title designs more than once in the features from Pordenone this year, and do so again now. Here, the title designs gesture at the secret “royalty” of Nickolo’s family, and the aristocratic pretensions of Sophie’s family.
But everything in this film is well designed. When André sees the hair tonic bottle produced by Sophie Svensson, the shape of the bottle dissolves onto the shape of the castle she has bought with its proceeds of its fabulous success.
Design matches aspiration throughout. André keeps the “thousand-year-old iron crown Tirania” in a secret case behind a mirrored cabinet door. The door is decorated with filigree that matches that used on the film’s intertitles: his secret is hinted at in the very design of the film’s narration. Likewise, when Sophie and Count Edelstjerna are discussing his plans to marry Astrid, Sophie has eyes only for the Count’s signet ring. The Count, too, has eyes only for the portrait of Astrid. Everyone’s aspiration is expressed through knowing gestures, comic transferences. Even Astrid’s rival for Nickolo’s heart, Karin, flirts with Nickolo by a kind of proxy: letting him continually fashion and refashion her hair. Hair itself becomes the means of access to various spaces: Astrid herself eventually invites Nickolo to the Svensson castle to cut her hair.
The rivals in romance play out in a lovely dance sequence in a wood beside the sea. It’s a cliché to expect beautiful coastal landscapes in Swedish films, but here is another. The camera views the circling lines of dancers from the festive Midsummer tree. It swirls and tracks, at one moment keeping pace with the dance, at others stepping aside to let others swirl around it. Couples swap, interact, tease, and reunite.
Nickolo and Astrid slip away on a rowing boat to an island. The film gives us gorgeous close-ups of the two leads—Brita Appelgren and Enrique Rivero—and we see them stood against sea and sky. The characters are falling for one another, so we must fall a little for them too.
The plot literally sails into view at this point: a large ship from Tirania, bearing the nation’s flag. Nickolo reveals he never knew his parents, since he was rescued from revolution in Tirania by André when he was an infant. Meanwhile, from shore, André secretly signals to the boat, crewed (we now learn) by people intent on conning money out of the old man. It signals that the plot will become more convoluted before the truth is revealed…
First, Sophie must be convinced of Nickolo’s worth. When she sees him shingling Astrid’s hair at the castle, he throws him out: a beautiful gag involving deep staging that shows off the scale of the castle and the scale of Sophie’s ambition. Nickolo is pushed through a never-ending series of doorways, all in the same shot, by the endlessly aggressive Sophie. Shingling is all the rage, but her hair-growth fortune takes it as an insult. (The film’s Swedish title makes the issue clearer: literally, “His Royal Highness the Shingler”, as does the German title “His Royal Highness the Bob-cutter”, something missed in the given English title. Nickolo specializes in a speciality of 1920s women’s fashion: the bob cut, a style inimical to the older generation of Sophie and her long hair-growth tonic industry.)
The agents extort money from André to help stage a coup and restore the dynasty, but he must get more funds from Sophie. He brings the ancient crown and unboxes it before Sophie’s goggling eyes. The pomp of ceremony is delightfully undercut as Sophie reaches out to touch the crown and André slaps away her hand and snaps shut the box.
The flashback to the story of revolution in Tirania is a lesson in how to maximize minimal budget of space and time in a montage. Guards in fezzes and Greek-style fustanella skirts swarm through palace corridors. Huge curtains billow. Gun barrels recoil. Flashes through windows. Soldiers pile on each other. An infant is handed to the young André, the King’s barber. The film uses only a handful of single-scene sets, but clever lighting, staging, and a wind-machine transform them into a microcosm kingdom, a time and place of drama and mystery. Drama and comedy blend in the story’s telling and reception: André having too much fun relaying past events, Sophie being too moved (and too ravenous) at the prospects of a royal future for her granddaughter and herself. Sophie has a fabulous vision of Nickolo and Astrid on the throne, dressed like dolls, crowning her as Queen Mother. (Karin Swanström, as Sophie, is superb and steals every scene she’s in.) André shows her the deeds to the dynasty, another written/visual symbol of aspiration to match its comic brethren: the ornate titles, the hair tonic bottle, the signet ring—even the modes of hair.
There follows a further complication of plot: not knowing her immanent fortune, Astrid wants to be abducted and escape with Nickolo onto the Tiranian ship, which falls into the plans of André and Sophie—and the Tiranian agents.
The machinations of the finale are set up in a complex series of intercutting spaces. In the barbershop: Nickolo, his female client Karin (jealous of Astrid), Astrid (jealous of Karin); elsewhere: two strangers that Astrid phones, pretending to be speaking to the Count, to make Nickolo jealous; finally, the Count himself, who is actually in the barbershop, snoozing in a booth.
I simply don’t have the time to describe the complexities of what happens in the next scene that night. There are ladders, lies, false abductions, real abductions, subterfuge, disguises, piles of money, pistols, hidden figures, speedboats, faulty engines, races to the rescue… It’s like a scene from P.G. Wodehouse orchestrated by Franz Léhar.
The best twist is that the villains’ ship is filled with other young men who have been told they are the Crown Prince of Tirania, each with a thousand-year-old iron crown of Tirania and the deeds to the throne. The villains kidnapped five orphans when the kingdom fell, and fobbed them off on perfect strangers whom they would later extort for profit. “We easily found five idiots”, the crook explains, “sorry—five patriots”, he corrects himself. It’s a delightful way of undercutting the absurdities of Ruritanian pomp—it takes a dig at the characters’ ambitions, as well as ours for expecting a fairy-tale ending. And why (the film surely asks us) should we favour the right of an exiled king to stage a coup d’état? The country’s name suggests Tirania was a tyrannical state, not a democracy. Why be nostalgic for a world of monarchical whim and caste-bound deference? As with Rupert of Hee Haw (though in a far more sophisticated fashion), Hans Kungl. Höghet Shinglar invites us to question the precepts of the Ruritanian genre on which it is founded.
Yet we do get a kind of fairy-tale ending, albeit one that is magnificently, showily mercantile: The couple marry and create their magical kingdom, a barbershop in Paris: “Grégory & Cie., Salon de Coiffure”, complete with the mythical Tiranian crown and royal accoutrements as part of the décor. Neon signs overlay the screen, the final marker of aspiration triumphantly stamped upon reality itself. Everyone gets what they want, including Sophie, who plays her part in the fantasy of the “king’s” barbershop alongside André. Sincerity didn’t suit them: they are better here as knowing performers. Why try and reclaim a real throne when one can simply create a fake one that’s more worthwhile?
It’s an ending that acknowledges the falsity of nationalist delusion. Balkan immigrants and Swedish merchants set up their own world in central Europe. It’s also a reflection of the film’s own hybridity: a German-Swedish co-production with a French-Chilean leading man and a German-Swedish cast. Better to be a cosmopolitan in Paris than an autocrat in a tiny kingdom. How nice to leave a film grinning from ear to ear.
Paul Cuff
The Realm of Silence 