Second Time Around

If I Were King
"If a man isn't inspired by his own death, then he's beyond inspiration." Poet/rogue François Villon is given a week to run France before he's executed in this highly entertaining costume drama from 1938 starring the ultrasmooth Ronald Colman. Colman, who specialized in playing silken-tongued aristocrats of the people, has no real equivalent in today's downmarket Hollywood: Tormented Jeremy Irons and Ralph Fiennes haven't the panache, while pudgy Kenneth Branagh lacks Colman's class.

Directed by Frank Lloyd from a screenplay by Preston Sturges, If I Were King foreshadows several of Sturges' own later films, notably Sullivan's Travels (1942), wherein a would-be populist filmmaker can't escape Hollywood no matter how hard he tries. The royal caravan here trailing the wandering poet at one point anticipates the van of studio stooges tagging after Sullivan. In this film "Hollywood" is the palace and royal environs Colman can't not return to. While Depression America is referenced by the device of using the threat of starvation as a central narrative drive, Sturges and/or Paramount Pictures reveal their essential conservatism with dialogue that urges the real king -- Basil Rathbone in a clever-evil-funny performance -- to treat his roistering, irresponsible subjects "like children instead of like enemies." As in other period films (Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame), mob rule is eschewed and revolutionary impulses are contained in favor of peasants who respond to kindness. This theme is in line with the rejection of all politics as corrupt in later Sturges films like The Great McGinty and Hail the Conquering Hero, and may explain why his films have dated so much less than, say, Frank Capra's.

-- Gregg Rickman

If I Were King screens Thursday and Friday, July 23 and 24, at 5:35 and 9:15 p.m. (with The Mark of Zorro at 7:30 p.m.) at the Stanford, 221 University (at Emerson) in Palo Alto. Tickets are $6; call (650) 324-3700.