The Affairs of Cellini (1934)

Really Surprised!

i must have seen a different film!!

Good start, but then it gets ruined

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

Benvenuto Cellini is probably not the most famous figure from Renaissance-era Italy. I had never heard of the man until I saw "The Affairs of Cellini". Nonetheless, the movie makes him look like one fun-loving guy. Assuming that it's accurate, Cellini (played by Fredric March) was someone who just wanted to get romantic...even if it was with a married woman.A lot of the lines come across as comic relief, and there's no shortage of sword-fighting. Just nice, harmless fun for a movie that purports to be historical. I guess that I wouldn't call the movie any sort of masterpiece, but it's still a fun movie. Fay Wray - hot off her role as the love interest of a certain giant ape - looks especially glam in some of those dresses; I suspect that between this movie and her most famous role, she turned a lot of boys into men back in the '30s.Anyway, it's nice, corny fun. Playing the duke is Frank Morgan, a few years before playing a certain man behind the curtain.

A duke takes a lover, so what does the duchess do? Take one of her own, of course! It doesn't help that the duchess's lover has been marked for execution by the duke who has no idea of what's going on in his own palace.Obviously, the name of the game here is sex, although the production code wouldn't let them make that obvious. Constance Bennett is the flirtatious duchess, the younger wife of the Duke of Flirence, played by the Oscar nominated Frank Morgan. Bennett is attracted to sculptor Frederic March, playing the title character who is in love with innocent Fay Wray. When the duke meets Wray, he decides to add her to his court, and no intention of including Wray's bearded mother, the delightfully funny Jessie Ralph.Speeding by with Morgan definitely a scene stealer, this came in a year of Hollywood history lessons, all more based on Encyclopedia synopsis with fictional dramatic elements to flesh them out. This is pure entertainment and succeeds on the fact that it is obviously a historical fairy tale and that any resemblance between this and historical fact was a total accident.

Gregory La Cava is one of Hollywood's great directors, but this isn't up to his standard, despite a good cast. Though supposedly a comedy of manners, it's really a swashbuckler with hardly any swash. Morgan, a milquetoast king though he tries to act ferocious, overdoes his "well I don't...ahem...do you really...oh well, I..." routine. Fay Wray is best as an artist's model. She's sexy, yet so dumb she hasn't the imagination for romance. At one point, when the other characters are trying to get her to take part in an elaborate charade to make someone think that someone is not someone's lover, she says, "Oh, this is so silly." One of the few really funny lines, and, sadly, all too true.

Stumbling across a neat little 80-minute gem like 1934's The Affairs of Cellini is reason enough to lease satellite TV (or a really good cable service, a contradiction in terms if ever there was one). Viewing it almost nearly 70 years after its premiere allows even the neophyte cineaste a neat precis of the progress (or lack of same) that film has made since then, plus primers in ace character acting and deft characterization by the writers.The film centers on 16th-century Florence, a hotbed of wealth and intrigue run by a family you might of heard of (the Medicis), and one of its leading artisans, the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini. Cellini (about whom Hector Berlioz wrote an opera and numerous poems and stories have been penned) is sort of a hybrid of Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel, with a dash of Don Juan thrown in for fun. Played by the very young, unabashedly gorgeous and surprisingly athletic Fredric March (seen many years later in such classics as Inherit the Wind, The Bridges at Toko-Ri and The Best Years of Our Lives), Cellini's a stiffnecked anti-aristocrat that the Duke of Florence (played hilariously by The Wizard of Oz himself, Frank Morgan) and his lethal-seductress wife (Fox's big star of the mid-'30s, Constance Bennett) can't seem to do without, so skilled at goldsmithing and seduction is he.Toss in Fay Wray (the year after making Kong go ape), Fox stalwart Louis Calhern in the Basil Rathbone role and the VERY young Lucille Ball in a supporting role, oodles of classic B&W cinematography, snappy directorial pace (by Fox veteran Gregory La Cava) and quasi-operatic sets and decoration, and you've got the kind of lunchtime matinee that 24-hour classic movie channels like Turner Classic and Fox Movies (where this can be seen at least twice a month) were meant to provide.