UnowPriceless
hyped garbage
Konterr
Brilliant and touching
Kaelan Mccaffrey
Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.
SnoopyStyle
King Rudolf IV (Peter Sellers) crashes his balloon and dies falling into a well. General Sapt (Lionel Jeffries) and his nephew Fritz travel to London to retrieve the playboy son Rudolf V (Sellers) from a gambling house. The King's half-brother Michael sends an assassin to kill him. He's having an affair with the married Countess Montparnasse (Elke Sommer). Cab driver Frewin (Sellers) rescues him from an assassin. General Sapt hires Frewin as a coachman but really he's being used as a decoy without his knowledge. Frewin is attacked by Michael's men and the new King meets him. Rudolf is captured and imprisoned in Michael's castle of Zenda. Frewin is coronated instead but Rudolf's fiancée Princess Flavia (Lynne Frederick) notices the ruse.Peter Sellers is playing multiple roles once again. There is nothing wrong with the plot. It's functional as a drama except it has no intention of being one. As a comedy, there are very few laughs. It's late in director Richard Quine's career and maybe the laughs weren't in him anymore. The slapstick is lazy. The jokes aren't there.
Robert J. Maxwell
No normal man should miss seeing Lynne Frederick as Flavia in this version, at least no normal man with a taste for neoteny. This young woman has the huge eyes and slightly woeful features of a ringtail lemur from Madagascar. No kidding. When she's surprised, her eyes open so wide that the white surround the irises. I tried it in the mirror and I can't do it. She looks every bit the princess. Not an elegant princess like Deborah Kerr but the kind of princess who, through the ruse of deceptive innocence, might deliberately invite your attentions and then swallow you up alive.Peter Sellers does what he can to turn his two parts into comic turns. As the King, he substitutes "w" for "r". As the dragooned London cabbie he looks worried, suspicious, indignant, and terribly puzzled. The script doesn't give him an opportunity to do much else. He could do a lot with a little when the opportunity was afforded him -- hilarious as Dr. Pratt in "The Wrong Box", constantly stoned, who writes his signature, "William Pratt, MD" and then reads it aloud as "William Prattmd." No such luck here. His best line comes when he's staring through a stereoscope, giggling, and says, "Oh, she got no knickers on." Most of the cast are stalwarts about ten years past their prime, but still good at what they do. There has rarely been a better villain, especially with a German accent, than the pebbly-faced Jeremy Kemp. John Laurie, the foul-tempered farmer in Hitchock's "39 Steps," is the Archbishop who knocks on wood for good luck, then turns around and stutters, "Uh, come in." Graham Stark is Erik, the flat-faced, dubious palace butler, who practically owns this kind of role. Lionel Jeffries staggers through the part of General Sapt, trying to hold Ruritania together. As Rupert of Hentzau, Stuart Wilson is flat and completely lacking in the wicked charm of, say, Douglad Fairbanks, Jr. As Sapt's orderly, Simon Williams creates a hole on the screen whenever he appears.The gags may once have been titillating but we've evolved beyond most of them. There are a couple of gay gags that look moth eaten by now. The director is Richard Quine, who knows his craft but brings nothing special to the enterprise. It looks as if the script were followed verbatim and the script is weak. It lacks wit. Blake Edwards would have probably handled it more deftly and allowed more spontaneous input, as he did with "The Pink Panther" and a number of other comedies that might not have looked promising on paper. The musical score follows suit, apparently thinking the pratfalls are funnier than they are. Maybe none of the gags are as thoughtful as the name of the local gunsmith -- Walther Luger.Of course, Anthony Hope Hawkins wrote the novel in chipped stone sometime during the Neolithic and the story has been around so long that it deserves to be parodied. There is a successful example too. You can find it near the end of "The Great Race" with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon.
TheLittleSongbird
I really wanted to like this. How could it go wrong with Peter Sellers and Lionel Jeffries on board as well as composer Henry Mancini and script-writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais? Sadly, something did go wrong, and I am still puzzled as what the biggest problem was with this film. Not all is bad though, the film has gorgeous sets and costumes and is beautifully shot, and Henry Mancini's score is great as you would expect from the composer of the Pink Panther movies, Great Mouse Detective and Breakfast at Tiffanys. However, the writing had all the ingredients to be funny but instead came across as forced(which is bad news for a spoof remake, which considering the source material was something I felt wasn't going to work in the first place), while the story as well as being sluggishly paced just lacks wit and thrills and the characters are rather cartoony(especially George Sierra). The acting fares little better, with Peter Sellers, who I consider a comic genius, coming across as both exaggerated and uninterested, while George Sierra even with bulging eyes makes little of his admittedly cartoony character and everyone else, especially John Laurie, have little to do and are dull as a result. In conclusion, not a complete disaster but just didn't work for me. 3/10 Bethany Cox
Growler_Griz
The new king is a fop, and a London cabbie, who is a gem, looks just like him (the old king used to come to London for recreation) so the cabbie is hired to stand in for the king. While assassins try to kill him, the pretty lady sees him for what he is - and falls in love with him. I cannot give away the ending, it's too amazing.This movie is full of jokes of all kinds, from subtle funny looks, to hilarious switcheroos; I think Peter Seller's very best movie. He's very funny, from the slapstick to the dumb looks in strange situations, etc. He was abused in the Pink Panther movies - having to do the same jokes over and over. Here we see some different ones, and quite good too. "She did an owl!!!" "He did a chicken!!" "What are you doing?" "That's my secret chicken signal." "You can't do that; that's my secret chicken!!!" "Whooo whooo!!!" "Bok bok bok!!!" The principle actors do their parts very well. I find myself cheering for the valiant cabbie, what a dude! and disgusted by the foppy prince - and have to stop and realize, it's the same actor! The actresses are one thing they certainly should be: gorgeous. And some of the minor parts are really nicely played, too. "Take this." "What is it?" "It's a ring, stolen from the Hapsburgs. It's priceless." Jailer squints at it trying to decide if it's worth risking his life over, and drops it in the sewer. "Ow... got anything else?" The look on his face is perfect.And there are themes of vast import behind the story. We are all fops and gems, rolled into one; the gem part of us is a prisoner inside, and the fop is what the world has cultivated.I haven't seen much of the other movies based on this same book, but this one does the story justice, and adds the funny element. I'd say it well improves the book, which was a little too baroque for my tastes.This movie has the one flaw that it looks like it was made in the 40's or 50's: the special effects are cheap, like the king falling down the well - these people could have gotten those effects looking better, but they chose not to for some reason. Let's assume that it was because they loved the old time movies with those fake-looking special effects. I just think of it as quaint and relax and enjoy the show. Maybe they spent their budget on sets and costumes - a lot of them look pretty elaborate. My copy is a VHS I taped off of WKRP or somewhere one night - the music sounds like it's been thru the grinder - and I still watch it occasionally and enjoy it for its immense merit as a story, and the acting and the jokes. Actually the fights aren't all that bad. I actually like the one on top of the carriage. Pretty amusing... "We're driverless!!!" "Not while I'm here you're not!"
