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Director Richard Thorpe by all accounts used a kinescope to wind through John Cromwell’s 1937 version of Anthony Hope’s 1893 skylarking novel whilst working on the cardboard-looking sets of this remake, reproducing camera set-ups exactly, thus beating Gus Van Sant’s infamous Psycho to the punch by forty-six years for attempting the exact copy of a classic.
Thorpe’s film then understandably lacks zest in staging and the pace wants a kick up the backside: it needs more action and less of the dishwater romance that sees Deborah Kerr unable to work up any enthusiasm for being romanced again by Stewart Granger, in the most dully inactive of princess parts, and nary an antelope in sight. But the film is shunted along by Granger’s effortless charisma, maintaining dignity even as he models a fetching array of fleece-collared faux-Junker tunics and royal togs that suggest Prussian Officer Chic by way of Coco Chanel.
And most pleasurable: a performance of machine-tooled wit from James Mason as everyone’s favourite Victorian-era Euro-trash anti-hero – well, second, after Count Dracula – Rupert of Hentzau. Mason enters the film tossing off bon mots of awesome cynicism and exits it in a high-dive after a sword-fight where the participants do actually seem to be trying to kill each-other. Mason’s so sharp he cuts a hole in the screen.
I don’t think anybody in Hollywood ever read Hope’s sequel, Rupert of Hentzau, and they certainly never adapted it, I expect because just about every character from the first novel dies in it…