Mark another one off for 5th Academy Awards nominees reviewed, I suppose. Happy to see TCM put up "The Guardsman," as I was afraid I would otherwise need to resort to the old VHS release of it someday. Predictably, it's a creaky early talkie, a bit stagy, although no more than expected from such a stage adaptation, and with no musical score to speak of--only the diegetic Chopin, as early talkies before "King Kong" (1933) largely seem to have forgotten how silent films were scored. A fair job is actually done to open the play up a bit, and the camera moves and the picture cuts frequently enough, if nothing special in itself. Some of the editing is awkward, although I appreciate the attempts at a bit of overlapping dialogue. None of that is very important, though. This is a clever and funny film, and I totally support real-life husband-and-wife acting team Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne receiving Oscar nominations for playing, well, a husband-and-wife acting team. Having seen some of the rest of the slate of 1931-1932 season contenders, I probably would've given this more nominations over some of the more overrated ones (ahem, "The Champ," ahem).
What's not to like? Lunt and Fontanne are deliciously ostentatious in their actorly manners. The rest of the cast of an entourage, including the always wonderful if underused ZaSu Pitts, play the role of our on-screen spectators to the actors' continued performances off-stage. Such actors are they that the characters don't have names. Even when the couple attend the opera nominally as spectators, the film never shows us the stage and instead focuses all the attention on their performances, which is in contrast with the first play-within-a-play scene where they're on stage and the picture entirely focuses on that. Off-stage, continuing to perform, the jealous husband puts on the disguise and accent of the titular Russian guardsman, prince, or whatever, to try to seduce his wife as a test of her fidelity. Meanwhile, we're to wonder whether the result is dramatic irony in that we know more than her, and she's acting to hide the budding affair from hubby, or whether she's playing along with the marital role play and, thus, fooling us. The entire premise being to equate the inherent insincerity of the acting process, of pretending to be someone else, with marital infidelity or sexual promiscuity.
Nowadays, even Ryan Murphy can figure out how to compare acting to cheating and prostitution in drivel such as his "Hollywood" (2020) mini-series, but there wasn't so much of this, at least this explicitly and thoroughly, back at the dawn of the talkies when a lot of plays could finally be adapted sonically as well as visually. Clever stuff.
What's not to like? Lunt and Fontanne are deliciously ostentatious in their actorly manners. The rest of the cast of an entourage, including the always wonderful if underused ZaSu Pitts, play the role of our on-screen spectators to the actors' continued performances off-stage. Such actors are they that the characters don't have names. Even when the couple attend the opera nominally as spectators, the film never shows us the stage and instead focuses all the attention on their performances, which is in contrast with the first play-within-a-play scene where they're on stage and the picture entirely focuses on that. Off-stage, continuing to perform, the jealous husband puts on the disguise and accent of the titular Russian guardsman, prince, or whatever, to try to seduce his wife as a test of her fidelity. Meanwhile, we're to wonder whether the result is dramatic irony in that we know more than her, and she's acting to hide the budding affair from hubby, or whether she's playing along with the marital role play and, thus, fooling us. The entire premise being to equate the inherent insincerity of the acting process, of pretending to be someone else, with marital infidelity or sexual promiscuity.
Nowadays, even Ryan Murphy can figure out how to compare acting to cheating and prostitution in drivel such as his "Hollywood" (2020) mini-series, but there wasn't so much of this, at least this explicitly and thoroughly, back at the dawn of the talkies when a lot of plays could finally be adapted sonically as well as visually. Clever stuff.