A comic extravaganza from the legendary Sacha Guitry, Les Perles de la Couronne takes off on an ingenious mixture of fact and fiction in telling the story of the pearls which adorn the English crown. In the process, it spans four centuries, introducing dignitaries from each - several hundred characters in all, of which Guitry himself plays only four. As the narrator he appears as “the stagey Guitry everyone expects: heavily made-up, with his owlish glasses, his adored pinky-rings, his long nails, his artfully-held cigarettes, his theatrical gestures, and that thoroughly inimitable voice” (Richard Traubner). Other highlights among the large and famous cast are Jean-Louis Barrault as Bonaparte, Arletty as an Ethiopian queen, and Jacqueline Delubac as Mary Stuart et al.
Like Marcel Pagnol, Guitry considered the cinema a means to preserve the theater; and like Pagnol, he succeeded, almost despite his own intentions, in creating cinema that was far more “filmic” than the average commercial movie. Les Perles de la Couronne is a complex narrative that continually plays with its filmic reality, from the clever credits to the inclusion of several languages - including Arletty's gibberish, which is the soundtrack played backwards. Pauline Kael has pointed to Guitry as an important contributor to the art of satire on film: “(He) developed a new approach to the talking picture: the narrator provides a cynical and witty counterpoint to the actions we observe....”