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 Joan 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