Sacha Guitry's Les Perles de la Couronne, from 1937, is a cinematic sorbet, sweet, light and not altogether filling. A film bouffe, it spans four hundred years as it tells the tale of seven precious pearls; four of which end up in the English royal crown. This provides Guitry a chance to stage a historical burlesque. Kings, thieves and courtesans parade by exchanging the pearls, often for sexual favors as they are passed to younger lovers by older ones who have lost their other charms. The tone is sly and sardonic, but the cinematic technique is often perfunctory. Guitry shoots a few scenes as tableau vivant, but most resemble vaudeville skits.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. When you have Arletty and Marcel Dalio, in blackface, spouting gibberish in the Abyssinian episode, the ensuing amusement renders moot any objections to the lack of cinematic style, taste, and racial propriety. This episode also contains a wily jab at Mussolini's recent invasion of Ethiopia. Like Chaplin, Guitry was a man of the stage, but he lacks Chaplin's gifts of cinematic framing and timing. Still, I do wonder if Chaplin's frolics with the globe in The Great Dictator were inspired by Guitry's hijinks with a rubber ball here. In multiple roles, Guitry and his then missus, Jacqueline Delubac, are so delightful that it seems to be churlish to be too critical of Les Perles de la Couronne.
