The Emperor's Candlesticks
あらすじ
No synopsis available.
作品考察・見どころ
AIが作品の魅力を深く読み解いています
原作・関連書籍
映画化された原作や関連書籍を読んで、映像との違いや独自の世界観を楽しみましょう。
No synopsis available.
AIが作品の魅力を深く読み解いています
映画化された原作や関連書籍を読んで、映像との違いや独自の世界観を楽しみましょう。
Based on the Baroness Orczy tale of Russian Imperial espionage, this is actually quite a fun, if insubstantial, historical drama. It all centres around attempts to free a Polish dissident from prison. At the time, Poland was a vassal of the Czar, and so a group of influential Poles coerce the Grand Duke "Peter" (Robert Young) to write to his father imploring his intervention. What's this got to do with candlesticks, you might think? Well these clever little ornate gadgets have secret compartments - easy enough to smuggle a letter in. When they are inadvertently moved, then sold-on a few times it falls to Polish agent "Wolensky" (William Powell) to stay one step ahead of his Czarist protagonist "Countess Mironova" (Luise Rainer) and recover them before their secret is discovered and heads start to roll. Of course, you just know that these two are going to start to fall for each other, and sadly that is where the thriller element of this film starts to give way to the romantic one, and once we are in full slush mode, the whole thing rather falls away as we approach an ending that offers us little by way of jeopardy. It's a good looking film, though. Plenty of attractive people in attractive costumes; there is some chemistry between Powell and Rainer and Frank Morgan is quite fun as "Baron Suroff". Franz Waxman provides us with a rather unremarkably derivative score though - a sort of "Scarlet Empress" (1934) type affair that doesn't really help the rather uninspiring dialogue. It's my kind of genre and the Baroness did know how to conjure up a good intrigue, but this is all just a bit too join-the dots.
