Tovarich

Boyer, one of Hollywood's most exotic male leads, specialised in playing suave, displaced European aristocrats. He's at his most irrepressibly smooth here as a White Russian refugee who's reduced to working as a butler for a French banker. (His equally haughty wife Colbert is taken on as the maid.) There is no hiding the snobbery behind this upstairs/downstairs comedy. You never doubt for a moment that class will out and that the two unlikely domestics will be restored to their previous, lofty social positions. Director Litvak, himself a Russian émigré in Hollywood, acquits himself well enough, but this is a film which surely would have been better suited to the talents of Lubitsch. (From the play by Jacques Deval, adapted into English by Robert Sherwood.