Poor ex-King Alfred VII (Fernand Gravel) never has any fun: he’s always too drunk. Officially diagnosed with “a clear case of acute boredom,” the young monarch-in-exile looks likely to spend the rest of his days holed up in his extravagant Paris boudoir, until impudent chorine Blondell catches his eye. Royal guardian Edward Everett Horton hatches a plan to use Blondell’s American disdain for pretense as a cure for Alfred’s jaded dipsomania: she’s “the first girl with enough spirit to walk out on him.” In production at the time of Edward VIII’s abdication, cowritten by Norman Krasna and Groucho Marx, the film is a sendup of royal romance in a Lubitsch vein, and a contemporary review praised Blondell for achieving “the subdued finesse of a Lubitsch heroine.” It was her favorite role, she said, “a girl with some intelligence and character—the kind of person chorus girls often are.”

—Juliet Clark

• Written by Norman Krasna, Groucho Marx. Photographed by Tony Gaudio. With Fernand Gravel, Joan Blondell, Edward Everett Horton, Jane Wyman. (94 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Warner Bros.)