Cinevent Notes Past: GRAND DUCHESS AND THE WAITER (1926)

[Richard M Roberts]

Paramount Pictures seemed to be on a “royalty hobnobbing with the commoners” kick in their 1925-26 season: KING ON MAIN STREET (1925) has his Highness Adolph Menjou finding happiness going to Coney Island and falling in love with Bessie Love. WOMAN OF THE WORLD (1925) where Countess Pola Negri visits her cousin Chester Conklin (how’s that for skewed genetics?) in Podunk USA. A REGULAR FELLOW (1926) has Prince Raymond Griffith arranging a revolution with a friendly neighborhood anarchist so he can be dethroned and reinstated as the elected president of the new republic just so he can marry Mary Brian. Even W. C. Fields befriends and is visited by the Princess Lescaboura (Alice Joyce) in SO’S YOUR OLD MAN (1926).

Adolph Menjou also gets to play the commoner side of the scenario, albeit a wealthy one, in THE GRAND DUCHESS AND THE WAITER. As Albert Durant, millionaire turfman, Menjou falls for the Russian Grand Duchess Zenia (Florence Vidor) whom, although reduced to a refugee, is too darn snooty for her own good. Adolph disguises himself as a waiter serving the Duchess just to be near her, and his ineptness so annoys her that she hires him for her personal staff just to humiliate him and teach him a lesson. Hey, he’s Adolph Menjou, so go figure he’s the best dressed waiter around, and it then becomes a battle of wits in the alls fair in love and war department.

Adolph Menjou was Paramount’s top top-hatted farceur in the 1920’s (although sometimes it seemed that Raymond Griffith was slapstick’s answer to him). Proof positive that suavity and elegance could actually come from Pittsburgh, Menjou had become a Paramount contract player in 1921 after years of extra and bit roles and worked his way up from supporting roles in some major features like THE SHEIK (1921) with Rudolph Valentino and THE THREE MUSKETEERS (1921) with Douglas Fairbanks to a lead role in Chaplin’s A WOMAN OF PARIS (1923) easily stealing scenes from star Edna Purviance. Paramount began headlining Menjou in a series of light romantic comedies in 1925, and he worked happily in this vein for the studio until talkies came in. Paramount dropped him when he wouldn’t accept a cut in pay before proving himself in sound and he found himself working in early talkie foreign language versions of American films (he was fluent in French and Spanish) to make ends meet until Josef Von Sternberg brought him back to Paramount to play Gary Cooper’s rival for Marlene Dietrich’s affections in MOROCCO (1930), establishing Menjou’s comeback as a character actor that would last another thirty years.

Acting like a duchess must have been second nature to Florence Vidor, the Texas-born first wife of director King Vidor. The attractive brunette with the finishing school poise seemed perfect casting for the part, and she and Menjou had worked together twice before , first in Ernst Lubitch’s THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE (1924) and most recently the successful ARE PARENTS PEOPLE (1925), where they had played a couple on the verge of divorce brought back together by their daughter (Betty Bronson).

Apparently Florence Vidor’s haughtiness was no act, as it seems to have brought an end to her marriage. One great Hollywood story has the actress being butt-kicked out the door of a party by Buster Keaton after she had publicly berated and humiliated her director/husband. Trading old wives for new, King Vidor still didn’t learn his lesson by marrying and later divorcing the equally high-hat Eleanor Boardman.

Talkies brought Florence Vidor’s career to an end after just one attempt in the medium, William Wellman’s CHINATOWN NIGHTS (1928). She sounds like a vibrating Margaret Dumont and so despised the experience that she married classical violinist Jascha Heifetz and called it quits on the movie biz.

Director Malcolm St. Clair had come to films as a lanky actor-comic for Mack Sennett in 1917, the 6’3” performer deciding to move behind the screen at the Fun Factory and begin directing the likes of Ben Turpin by 1919. He worked as a writer and co-director for Buster Keaton on his early two-reelers, and was handling feature films by 1924. The success of St. Clair’s ARE PARENTS PEOPLE for Paramount in 1925 established his reputation as a fine light comedy director and this reteaming of that pictures principals and director was Paramount’s successful attempt to make lightning strike twice. St. Clair would direct other successful Paramount comedies like THE SHOW-OFF (1926) with former Sennett colleague Ford Sterling and Louise Brooks, and the first film version of Anita Loos’ GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (1928). The director would have some problems adapting to talkies as seen by his work on the molasses-moving THE CANARY MURDER CASE (1929) with William Powell and Louise Brooks, which also slowed down his career in the early thirties, but he continued to work mainly at 20th Century-Fox from the mid-thirties on as a capable helmsman of their programmer product, including several of the better (a relative term of course) films Laurel and Hardy made for the studio in the forties after leaving Hal Roach.

Albert Savoirs original stage play “Le Grande-duchess et le garcon d’etage” was a popular property at Paramount. They first remade it a scant two years later with Menjou again in the lead trying to impress leading lady Evelyn Brent as HIS TIGER LADY (1928). The studio then retooled it further to fit Bing Crosby and Kitty Carlisle for 1934’s HERE IS MY HEART. In this, its original filmic incarnation, Paramount and company are doing what they did best at the time, sophisticated light comedy with a sheen to impress the New York audiences, but with an eye to entertaining the sticks, so perhaps that’s why they liked to mix their royalty and commoners into a happy common denominator.


RICHARD M ROBERTS