Four years before playing dual roles in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Ronald Colman did the same in The Masquerader (1933), in many respects a strikingly similar film. Colman here plays Sir John Chilcote, a prominent member of the House of Commons with a drug addiction, as well as John Loder, an idealistic journalist who happens to be Chilcote's distant cousin and - of course - happens to look just like him. Chilcote's political gifts are needed as England faces a devastating economic crisis, but Chilcote is irresponsible, mean, disheveled and manic as he increasingly suffers a physical and mental breakdown. His colleagues are at their wits' ends with him, but he is so talented on the Commons floor that they continue to put up with his unreliability. Happening across his cousin Loder one foggy evening, and then later reading a rousing editorial written by him, Chilcote gets the idea of having Loder take his place for awhile.
Plot mechanics enable this to happen, and Loder soon finds himself not only giving a rousing speech in Parliament (as Chilcote) but then being whisked to Chilcote's stately home, where he must deal with a wife, mistress, friends and servants whom he has never met. Intriguing complications begin when Loder falls for Chilcote's estranged wife Eve (Elissa Landi) but is not in the least attracted to Chilcote's mistress Diana (Juliette Compton). As a result, Eve starts falling for her seemingly changed husband while Diana is so distraught she eventually hires a detective to check up on him. The real Chilcote, meanwhile, lays low in Loder's flat, faring worse and worse from his drug addiction, a condition never explicitly mentioned in the dialogue but unmistakably conveyed in this pre-Code film.
As in most movies of this era with convoluted plots, The Masquerader plays much better on screen than any written description can convey. There's coincidence and contrivance galore, as well as a somewhat uneven tone that veers between light drama and dark tragedy, but it's all so well played (by Colman especially) and so well photographed (by the great Gregg Toland) that the audience is carried along on an enjoyable ride.
The property was already known to the public and had proven itself successful in the past. The Masquerader began as a 1905 novel by John Hunter Booth and then became a 1917 play by Katherine Cecil Thurston - a hit which ran for several years. A silent movie version was produced in 1922. When producer Samuel Goldwyn decided to mount a talkie remake 10 years later, he knew that his contract star Ronald Colman would be perfect for the lead. After all, Colman had already made 17 pictures for Goldwyn, including The Magic Flame (1927), the first film in which Colman played dual roles. The actor had also easily made the transition to sound; he was one of the few to do so with his popularity and romantic image intact. With his beautifully resonant voice and an ability to move through the frame with grace and purpose, Colman became an even bigger star in the sound era than he had been in silents. He was well-suited to stories of romance and history, and even though The Masquerader takes place in the present, its atmosphere of political crisis makes it feel like history is at stake; Colman's duty-bound, decent image feels right at home here. (And of course, the romantic subplot is also perfect for him.)
Colman has fun with Chilcote's and Loder's wildly contrasting characters. It's not just that Chilcote is cruel and Loder is decent; Colman expresses how each man thinks differently, or walks through the frame differently. As an example, take the long sequence in which Loder arrives at Chilcote's house and has no idea where anything is, where any door leads, or who anyone else is. Colman does an absolutely superb job here of using mannerisms and halting physical movement to show a man faking his way through it all, and the contrast with Chilcote's barreling through the frame is very apparent.
One would never otherwise guess that behind the scenes of The Masquerader, a very ugly spat was taking place between Colman and Goldwyn. On November 11, 1932, about two weeks before filming began, Colman sued Goldwyn for $2 million, claiming defamation of character. During production of their previous film, Cynara (1932), a Goldwyn publicist told the press that Colman liked to drink before shooting and tended to be drunk on the set. (The quote most at issue was: "Colman feels he looks better for pictures when moderately dissipated than when completely fit.") An outraged Colman saw this as the last straw in a string of offensive treatments by Goldwyn. He was outraged and a public battle ensued. Colman later said, "I had been patient long enough with Goldwyn. The offenses were repeated over and over again, and only massive retaliation could undo the harm done by those publicity releases." Sensing things might not turn out well, Goldwyn rushed The Masquerader into production while he still had his star around. The suit was eventually settled, but Colman refused to make any more pictures for Goldwyn.
Colman had two years remaining on his contract. He couldn't work anywhere else, so he simply sat those years out - a risky move for one of the world's most popular movie stars. As it turned out, he made a successful comeback in 1934 with Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back, a United Artists release, and followed that up with some of the best work of his entire career, including Lost Horizon (1937). Goldwyn, incidentally, kept The Masquerader on the shelf for quite some time after it was completed since he knew it would be his last Ronald Colman title. The film was finally released in September 1933.
Also in the cast of The Masquerader are Halliwell Hobbes, excellent as the butler who for most of the story is the only one to know of the deception, and Elissa Landi as Chilcote's wife. Italian-born Landi was a real beauty with a brief film career mostly in the 1930s. She projects a palpable sensuality here beneath her calm surface, and emits far more sex appeal than does Juliette Compton's mistress Diana. Landi later became a novelist and poet before she died young (age 43) of cancer.
Cinematographer Gregg Toland, of future Citizen Kane (1941) fame, experiments in The Masquerader with deep-focus photography, near film-noir lighting in many scenes involving Chilcote, and also in photographing ceilings, a rare sight in this era. His trick photography for the shots involving both Ronald Colmans is amazingly realistic and well done, and it was much remarked upon at the time.
Producer: Samuel Goldwyn
Director: Richard Wallace
Screenplay: Howard Estabrook (adaptation and screenplay); Moss Hart (dialogue); John Hunter Booth (play), Katherine Cecil Thurston (novel)
Cinematography: Gregg Toland
Art Direction: Richard Day
Film Editing: Stuart Heisler
Cast: Ronald Colman (Sir John Chilcote/John Loder), Elissa Landi (Eve Chilcote), Juliette Compton (Lady Diana Joyce), David Torrence (Fraser), Claude King (Lakely), Halliwell Hobbes (Brock), Helen Jerome Eddy (Robbins).
BW-80m.
by Jeremy Arnold
