Film Summary DCXCV (Cafe Metropole)



A fake romance involving a fake identity, all in the vain attempts to acquire vast amounts of money so that two scoundrels get out of financial difficulty.

That is what this film ultimately leads to in its first major half.
You got Adolphe Menjou playing this semi abcentric Frenchman who runs this (supposedly) fancy restaurants / Dancehall.
He somehow has the ability to acquire guests of the highest calibre, from Finance ministers, taxation officers, royalty and American Business tycoons.
Yet for some reason he's 90000 Francs in the hole.
We don't know why he's in the hole with so much money. But given his current attitudes and method of dealing with unique problems we can probably surmise he's falling in hot water several times before and everything's starting to catch up with him.

In a way I'm disappointed that more of the film isn't focused on Menjou character.
He's interesting, exciting and overall he's got a sense of personality to him.
The same cannot be said for his counterpart Tyrone Power. Who starts out really well playing this drunkard sitting around at a Nightclub around closing time demanding to eat a eagle.

You get this really great sense that Power's is this eccentric millionaire with way too much money and way too much time on his hands.
Drunk out of his mind and completely indifferent to the world around him.
I was expecting him to be a real wildcard of emotion inside of this ever thickening case of fake identity.

You see he's drunk and poor but pretending to be rich, while Menjou is pretending to be extravagant and well off.
The two of them are both in a horrible trouble and require a large sum of money.

They concoct a plan involving a semi extinct line of Russian nobility where Tyrone power's act plays this wealthy aristocrat Who falls head-over-heels for an American Girl linked with an extremely wealthy family.
And of course the entire scenario goes belly-up from a pretty early point.
The guy and girl kind of fall one another before they even realize who each other are. One of the waiters working at the restaurant turns out to actually have a royal lineage connected to that Russian name and wants his own cut of the action for having his family's name insulted.
And of course this wealthy American pretending to be a Russian has a horrible accent that he constantly turns off, so you're pretty darn sure that the American Girl is convinced that he's a fake from the start.
Then we have to watch these two interactive with each other in what's supposed to be a comedic farce. But it comes off as annoying.
At least that's the way I see it.
I don't like these kind of stories to begin with, you really have to work on your characters to make me interested in a bunch of fake relationships.
And these two people barely have any character to begin with. The actors are doing a decent job, but they're playing these Blank Slate American people who are purposely disinterested with their place in life.

And the idea of sitting here and watching their conclusion is just not interesting to me. Generally I do try to finish movies before talking about them but in this case I think I'll just call it a day.
It's only an hour and 20 minutes long and halfway through it I am absolutely exhausted by it. I don't care what happens to any of these people.

I can't say that I'm disappointed or surprised. I found this movie randomly on a search result today and decided to watch it out of curiosity. Not expecting to know what I would get out of it.

Okay so in all fairness I tried to skip through a little bit to a few other random scenes just to see if anything had progressed.
And it's just a bunch of people yelling at each other in fake European accents.
Because you know that's what the Europeans do: "They scream!!".
So I think I'm saving myself a headache with this one.

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