Opening with the Bastille Day celebrations in Paris (embellished with Litvak’s trademark crane and rooftop shots) and quickly singling out two down-and-out Russian exiles, a former Prince and a Grand Duchess played by Charles Boyer and Claudette Colbert, the couple innocently ask a musician why people are dancing all over the city.
“It has something to do with history,” the musician replies. Colbert and Boyer need the rest of the film to find out how much their own personal relationship and struggle for survival has something to do with history. The Czarist fortune they faithfully safeguard puts a Bolshevik Commissar on their tail. The penniless aristocrats seek a job as servants for the spoiled Duponts whose mansion becomes the stage for a soft screwball comedy as things go charmingly hokey pokey.
The script was penned by ever-reliable Casey Robinson, based on Robert E. Sherwood’s English adaptation of a French play by Jacques Deval which had a successful 4-year run in Broadway. After having bowed out of Cette vieille canaille, and with Mayerling making him a huge star, Boyer and Litvak were reunited in the US. When Warner rejected a remake of Cette vieille canaille, Litvak pitched Tovarich. Despite Boyer’s reservation about playing a Russian in Paris – he argued that the only cast member with a real French accent would be him – he gave in. The film’s success, even in France, proved Boyer’s worries baseless. In an example of star power contributing to the overall look of a film, Charles Lang was summoned from Paramount on Colbert’s request. When Lang’s slow pace in setting up the camera upset the studio who fired him, Colbert defended him and gave up two weeks’ worth of her salary to reinstate him.
Premiered at the same time as Mayerling was enjoying a delayed US distribution, this forerunner of Anastasia in terms of investigating identity, history and displacement had all the elements that Litvak cared for: role-playing, old world sophistication winning over socialism, couples losing privilege but finding their place in the new world, and the acknowledgment, albeit in an ambivalent tone, of new political structures which makes for the film’s fantastic finale.

Ehsan Khoshbakht