The Vagabond King (1956)
8 February 2026 12:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI have been working on some of the songs from the Rudolf Friml musical/operetta and so thought I would take a look at this filmed version; I wasn't expecting it to be terribly good or terribly close to the source material, although I know the latter only from the prompt lines and lyrics in the score and from the original novel If I Were King, which I wondered about for years and actually enjoyed a lot when I tracked it down on Project Gutenberg. But from those sources alone (plus the number of 'new songs' credited in the opening titles) it was pretty obvious that Hollywood had made some wide-sweeping changes to the story and music, with the opening song ("Bon Jour!") for one being pure Disney...
It has basically been used as source material for a standard B-movie swashbuckler of the era (as with the Hollywood film of The Black Arrow), with the costuming and sets of a stage pantomime -- it is trying to be another "Adventures of Robin Hood", and was even directed by Michael Curtiz, but this is the cheap generic version. The music is not great, though I don't really care for operetta-style singing of the period anyway (Villon is apparently played by a Covent Garden tenor whose accent was so thick his dialogue had to be dubbed); a lot of the original songs are missing, and so far as I can tell the surviving ones ("Only a Rose", "Some Day", "Song of the Vagabonds", Huguette's waltz "Never Hope to Bind Me") mostly occur in a changed context. Leonard Maltin rates the film at 2 stars out of 5, which is probably fair enough.
But going into it with low expectations I did actually enjoy it more than I might have thought. Largely I suspect this is down to Walter Hampden's scene-stealing performance as wily old Louis XI -- the lovers are wooden and it's hard to have much sympathy with them, but the King is a three-dimensional character.
It has basically been used as source material for a standard B-movie swashbuckler of the era (as with the Hollywood film of The Black Arrow), with the costuming and sets of a stage pantomime -- it is trying to be another "Adventures of Robin Hood", and was even directed by Michael Curtiz, but this is the cheap generic version. The music is not great, though I don't really care for operetta-style singing of the period anyway (Villon is apparently played by a Covent Garden tenor whose accent was so thick his dialogue had to be dubbed); a lot of the original songs are missing, and so far as I can tell the surviving ones ("Only a Rose", "Some Day", "Song of the Vagabonds", Huguette's waltz "Never Hope to Bind Me") mostly occur in a changed context. Leonard Maltin rates the film at 2 stars out of 5, which is probably fair enough.
But going into it with low expectations I did actually enjoy it more than I might have thought. Largely I suspect this is down to Walter Hampden's scene-stealing performance as wily old Louis XI -- the lovers are wooden and it's hard to have much sympathy with them, but the King is a three-dimensional character.