Paid To Love

Prince Michael of San Savona, a small Balkan nation, enlists the aid of American banker Peter Roberts to help improve his kingdom's economy. However, Roberts quickly realizes that what the prince needs is a queen, not an investment plan. Serendipity arrives in the form of a young woman who collapses outside Michael's home during a rainstorm. Generally clueless on how to behave around the fairer sex, the prince thinks nothing of stripping off her wet clothing and placing her in his bed to recover. After this inauspicious first meeting, Michael learns that the young woman - Gaby - is a former cabaret dancer, hardly the type royalty ever considers marrying. With the help of Roberts, the pair will surmount their differences and find they're destined for each other…but not without some bumps along the way.

"I once made a film, Paid to Love," Howard Hawks told Cahiers du Cinema in 1956, "with a great many camera effects, but I have never used such trickery since that time." Indeed, Paid to Love finds the legendary director under the spell of such contemporaries as F.W. Murnau and Ernst Lubitsch, with lush, dreamlike scenarios taking place in a mythical Old World kingdom. Though Hawks wasn't pleased with the results - he refused to watch Paid to Love when a print was rediscovered in the 1970s - it makes for an entry in his filmography like no other. "If Hawks could have been persuaded to see it again before his death," stated historian William K. Everson in his program notes for the film, "he might well have changed his mind about it!" Muscular leading man George O'Brien was working as a stuntman when he was "discovered" by John Ford and cast as the lead in The Iron Horse (1924). Though he starred in Murnau's masterpiece Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), he is probably best known for the dozens of Westerns he made in the talkie era. Virginia Valli had been the first "Hitchcock blonde" in the director's debut feature, 1925's The Pleasure Garden (her hair appears with its natural brunette shade here.) Also featured is a young William Powell as the film's heavy - a common fate for the actor during the Silent Age, before Hollywood discovered the sophisticated urbaneness that would serve him well throughout six Thin Man movies. (1927)

Upplagd i sortimentet: 30 december, 2024