The suave and debonair Ronald Colman plays aristocrat in exile Paul Gaillard, a taxi driver in Paris who gambles with money raised by fellow émigrés in the White Russian community. Colman was under contract to 20th Century Pictures when it merged with Fox Film Corporation and The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo was his first film for the newly-branded 20th Century Fox. At a brief 71 minutes, it was also the shortest film he made since arriving in Hollywood over a decade ago.
Colman was one of Hollywood's class acts, handsome and sophisticated, with a regal bearing and an elegant and polished speaking voice. He was equally at home as a romantic lead or a tormented hero but he also had a knack for light comedy, which is exactly what The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo called for. Producer Darryl F. Zanuck wanted Sylvia Sidney as his love interest, a mysterious woman with an ulterior motive, but was unable to negotiate a loan-out from Paramount Pictures so he reunited Colman with Joan Bennett, his co-star in his talking picture debut Bulldog Drummond (1929). Colin Clive, who had just co-starred with Colman in Clive of India (1935) but will forever be remembered as the original Dr. Henry Frankenstein, plays Bennett's scheming brother. The great character actor Nigel Bruce, who went on to play Dr. Watson to Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes in over a dozen films, provides dryly sardonic counterpoint as Colman's loyal valet.
According to the trade papers of the day, John Ford was initially set to direct but bowed out due to an injury. Stephen Roberts, a silent movie veteran who directed the notorious The Story of Temple Drake (1933), one of the most daring dramas of the pre-code era, and the romantic comedy Star of Midnight (1935) with William Powell and Ginger Rogers, stepped in. It was one of his last pictures. Roberts died less than a year after the release of Monte Carlo at the age of 41, his promising career cut short by a heart attack.
The original song that gave the film its title is nowhere to be heard in the movie but has its own cinematic history. The characters of Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) sing it during a car ride in the country and Peter O'Toole practically shouts the lyrics as T.E. Lawrence when he travels through the desert in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). More recently it can be heard in Alien: Covenant (2017) as Michael Fassbender's android character croons the song to himself.
While the film remains a footnote in Colman's career, overshadowed by such beloved classics and popular hits as A Tale of Two Cities (1935), Lost Horizon (1937), and The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), it became the center of a major legal case. 20th Century Fox was sued for copyright infringement by the rights holders of the song and the plaintiff, who brought their suit to the Canadian courts, was awarded over $1 million in damages. Fox appealed and in 1938 it was overturned by the Ontario Court of Appeals, which ruled that Fox's use of the song title as the title for their motion picture did not constitute an infringement of copyright since it did not borrow anything else from the song. It set a legal precedent in Canadian copyright law.
Sources:
The Bennett Playbill, Joan Bennett and Lois Kibbee. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
Ronald Colman: A Very Private Person, Juliet Benita Colman. William Morrow, 1975.
The Films of Ronald Colman, Lawrence J. Quirk. Citadel Press, 1977.
The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, Robin Quinn. The History Press, 2016.
Francis, Day & Hunter Ltd v Twentieth Century Fox Corp, The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council Decisions. October 12, 1939.
AFI Catalog of Feature Films
IMDb
By Sean Axmaker