Glorious Betsy was adapted from a relatively unsuccessful play about an interesting historical moment involving Napoleon Bonaparte. Well, it’s really more about Bonaparte’s brother Jerome and his marriage to an American woman named Elizabeth Patterson. She’s nicknamed Glorious Betsy for reasons that are not particularly addressed in the film, but given that she’s a rather flirtatious Southern belle with plenty of suitors around her at all times and she’s played by the luminous Dolores Costello, you can just use your imagination. What Betsy doesn’t realize is that her French tutor is Jerome Bonaparte, so she treats him rather harshly (always a sign that a woman in a movie is in love with the man) and makes a big talk about meeting Napoleon’s brother and perhaps falling in love with him. Jerome (played by Conrad Nagel) has a habit of skipping town just when something big is about to happen that he doesn’t like; that’s how we wound up in Virginia in 1804 posing as a tutor. When the Patterson family departs for Baltimore for a party at their home there in Jerome’s honor, Betsy’s tutor shows up and demands that she agree to marry him, no matter who he is. Of course, viewers know that he’s about to reveal himself at the party as the famed Frenchman’s brother, so we just grin as she finally agrees after a series of melodramatic denials. Here’s the catch: Napoleon has already arranged a marriage for his brother to a princess from Wurttemberg (Catherina Fredericka or something similar), and he refuses to acknowledge Betsy as Jerome’s wife or even let her set foot on French soil. Napoleon (played by Pasquale Amato with a very stoic face) boards the ship bringing his brother and Betsy to France, and Betsy pleads her case to no avail. Napoleon needs the arranged marriage for political advantage. Defeated, Betsy must return to the United States, where she becomes the subject of a great deal of gossip. If they only knew that she was also pregnant with Jerome’s child, the rest of society would truly have something to talk about. At first, she refuses to let her husband know, but after the marriage is annulled by Napoleon and the wedding to the princess nears, she shares this little tidbit about him having a son. This being a Hollywood ending, Jerome, as is his habit, ditches the princess and heads back to America to be reunited with Betsy. Of course, that’s not what happened at all in real life. The real Jerome married the princess and stayed in Europe. I’ve mentioned before, though, that one should never turn to the movies for history lessons. The movies are good at drama, but often that drama isn’t historically accurate. Glorious Betsy was originally a part-silent/part-talkie movie, and you can tell that some sequences are meant to demonstrate talking and singing. However, the sound discs (Warner Bros. Vitaphone) have been lost, so we only have a mute print available. The talking/singing portions are relatively brief, though, so it’s not difficult to imagine some of what might have been said. Unfortunately, the current prints have intertitles that are often too dark to read, and this poses as much of a difficulty as trying to lipread during the sound passages. I’ll only mention in passing that since this film is set, at least in part, during the antebellum South, some actors appear in blackface, and particularly ugly blackface in one instance. It’s horribly disconcerting when you realize this, and it makes what is otherwise a perfectly innocuous little movie into something rather sad and pathetic.
Oscar Nomination: Best Writing / Adaptation
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