"She is a brilliant comedienne, which to me means she also is an extremely skilled actress." 

- Sir Laurence Olivier on Marilyn Monroe

 

The Prince And The Showgirl DVD

 

14 June 1957

"The Prince and the Showgirl"

 

WHAT IS PERHAPS THE MOST DIVERTING PIECE OF CASTING IN MANY A YEAR - BRITAIN'S SIR LAURENCE OLIVIER WITH HOLLYWOOD'S MARILYN MONROE - turns out to be the most diverting and original thing about their film, "The Prince and the Showgirl," presented at the Music Hall yesterday. The mere thought of Britain's great Shakespearean playing a romantic lead opposite Hollywood's most famous and least pedantic blonde is sufficient to start the mind imagining some highly potential comic scenes. And the mere sight of them together is equally rewarding for a while.

Lodged in spacious, ornate chambers which are aptly designed to simulate a royal suite in the Carpathian Embassy in London at the time of the coronation of King George V, these two get going quite nicely as an overly stuffy Balkan prince and an American showgirl whom he is wooing with the old after-theatre-supper routine. Sir Laurence, in exquisite haberdashery, makes an amusingly clumsy would-be rake, and Miss Monroe in a skin-tight white creation makes a suitably gauche and cautious dame.

The elements, lifted in person by Terence Rattigan from his play, "The Sleeping Prince," give promise of developing amusement, despite the vague familiarity of the scene.

However, we're bound to tell you Miss Monroe never gets out of that dress and Mr. Rattigan never swings out of the circle in which he has permitted his thin plot to get stuck. Although he has made some feeble nudges with a hint of a dark conspiracy on the part of the prince's unloved gosling to overthrow his dad, and although he has tossed in a dowager queen to make a few haughty, humorous cracks, he has not let his story do much more than go around and around and then come to a sad end. The prince goes back to his country and the showgirl goes back to the Gaiety.

Furthermore - and this is disappointing - his characters do not have enough to do to allow a diverting demonstration of their elaborate acting skills. Sir Laurence is kept pretty much a stuffed-shirt, wearing a monõcle and speaking in Teutonic accents that are unpleasant and hard to understand. And Miss Monroe mainly has to giggle, wiggle, breathe deeply and flirt. She does not make the showgirl a person, simply another of her pretty oddities.

However, under Sir Laurence's direction, Sybil Thorndike plays the dowager queen with delightful fuzziness and hauteur, Richard Wattis makes a starchy minister and Jeremy Spenser is insufferably snippy as the prince's son. The settings are elegant in color and some bits of footage of the last Coronation are inter-cut.

The main trouble with "The Prince and the Showgirl," when you come right down to it, is that both characters are essentially dull. And incidentally, the scene shown in advertisements of Sir Laurence kissing Miss Monroe's shoulder does not appear in the film.

Bosley Crother - New York Times

 

 

 

"The crew often thought she wasn't acting
- until the rushes start showing up."

 

"FOR ME, THIS IS MONROE'S GREATEST PERFORMANCE - JUST AS "CAMILLE" IS GARBO'S. In "Camille" you never catch Garbo acting, every line feels tossed off or thrown away except the big ones, which get the full heartcry the script calls for. In Monroe's film her every line flows from her with an assurance she matched only in "Bus Stop" and never feels acted.

Jack Cardiff fills the screen with glowing color to match the decor and costumes and much of my delight lies in having the full screen aglow, wall to wall and top to bottom with luscious light - light focused often on MM's sheer glory. Olivier's line readings are great fun, a grotesque joy, but MM reads like an angel and steals the show with her heartfelt method realism. What can one say about her that isn't less than she deserves here?

For the horrors behind the filming, you might turn to Colin Clark's "The Prince, the Showgirl, and Me: Six Months on the Set with Marilyn and Olivier" where this angel's neuroses are revealed in full. (More on behind the scenes.) And yet Sybil Thordyke, her costar here as the Queen Mother, said of MM during the shooting that she was the only one on the set who knew how to act on film and be natural. The crew often thought she wasn't acting - until the rushes start showing up." - Donald A Newlove

 

Sybil Thordyke, right as the Queen Mother, said Marilyn was the only one on the set who knew how to act on film and be natural.

 

 

"The title of the Anglo-American The Prince and the Showgirl could well have alluded to the genuine stations in life of stars Sir Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe. Based on the Terence Rattigan play The Sleeping Prince, the film casts Olivier as Charles, prince regent of Carpathia, who is in London to attend the 1911 coronation of King George V. Monroe is deceptively dizzy American chorus girl Elsie Marina, who while performing in a West End revue catches Charles' eye. The prince arranges for Elsie to attend an "intimate supper" at his hotel suite. Though Elsie successfully wards off Charles' advances, she drinks too much bubbly and ends up falling asleep. Comes the dawn, and Prince Charles is anxious to show the awkward Elsie the door. She, however, has fallen in love with the prince, and sticks around long enough to upset a plan to overthrow the Carpathian throne, and to patch up a feud between Charles and his son Nicholas (Jeremy Spencer). Olivier directed as well as starred in The Prince and the Showgirl; he knew he had his work cut out for him in dealing with the mercurial Marilyn Monroe, but he managed to hold his temper and to extract a delightful comic performance from the actress. Alas, the film was a box-office disappointment, leading many Hollywood insiders to moan and wail that Monroe was "washed up" in films -at least until her spectacular comeback in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959)". - Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

 

SEE ALSO: Did Olivier humiliate Marilyn on the set of "The Prince and the Showgirl"?

 

AWARDS FOR THE PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL

Win
Best Supporting Actress - Sybil Thorndike - 1957 National Board of Review

Nomination
Best Film - Any Source - 1957 British Academy of Film and Television

 

 

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The Prince And The Showgirl (1957) DVD

 

 

 

 

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