Richard Quine has suffered long and unfairly from comparisons with his friend and frequent collaborator Blake Edwards, and his comic version of The Prisoner Of Zenda seems certain to cause renewed suffering -- partly because of Edwards's earlier use of a Zenda subplot in his The Great Race, and partly because of the presence of Peter Sellers, who himself is inseparably tied to Edwards by his Inspector Clouseau character. Not that this movie is, on its merits, a washout. Shot in lovely fairy-tale landscapes in Austria, it has a satisfying and evenly spread supply of gags, and unlike the last two or three of Edwards's underplotted and overgagged Clouseau movies, it has a judicious sense of what its gags are worth. There is an especially well-turned scene of a midnight assignation at an old windmill, bringing together two cloak-and-dagger novices, neither of whom is able to do the traditional owl hoot to signal their waiting cohorts, but both of whom are able to do pretty fair chickens. In addition, this movie does for Sellers what his too numerous Clouseau movies cannot: it offers him the chance to lengthen his already lengthy gallery of memorable comic portraits with two more: one a debauched aristocrat who sports an Oscar Wilde haircut and speaks as if with a clothespin on his nose and an ice cube on his tongue, and the other a Cockney-accented, no-nonsense, kidney-pie sort of chap, name of Sid, who drives a London hansom. These deftly sketched caricatures give a new life to Zenda's drooping Doppelganger theme, getting straight to the class-conscious point with the bluntness and brashness of a good political cartoon. (1979) — Duncan Shepherd
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