“Ah, if I were king…” · 5:55pm Mar 29th, 2015
You know that line. You know the voice behind it: a breathy, lightly-accented English baritone that suggests a poet, but a poet with a wrist of steel. It’s been parodied almost to death, used as the voice of cartoon characters and cereal mascots…
Odie Cologne, whose voice you can hear here.
Do I hafta explain?
… but despite that it’s still the voice we think of when we think: Swashbuckler.
Did you know it’s the voice of a movie star who was once as big as Errol Flynn? Did you know it’s from a movie that came out in direct competition with Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood?
That movie was the story of a college-educated white kid who became a gangsta rapper—in medieval Paris. That same story inspired a hit Broadway musical, a meme as big as “All your base,” a silent film that led to an iconic fantasy series, and that line of poetry which sounds like one of the gangsta rapper’s poems. But it isn’t.
That line is from a fanfic…
(A big nerdy explanation for TheMaskedFerret, who asked 
)
Maybe you’ve heard somebody say—like, in reference to FORTRAN or Betamax—“But where are the snows of yester-year?” Congratulations: you know at least one line of medieval poetry. It’s from the 15th-century French poet François Villon’s Ballade of Bygone Ladies. Originally “Mais où sont les neiges d'antan,” it was translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti , a pop-star poet of 19th-century England (like all pop stars he had a genius for the lyric hook).
Villon himself had a right to sing the blues. Unlike Messrs. Mathers, Van Winkle and Zimmerman, he really was born into a world of poverty and strife. In 1431 the King of France was at war with the Duke of Burgundy (q.v. *), which war, combined with a series of awful winters, had so blighted Paris that wolves could come into the city and attack people in broad daylight (sound familiar?). Villon’s mother was single. A kind uncle provided for them both, and the boy showed such promise that he eventually got into the University of Paris, then the greatest center of learning in Europe. He graduated in 1449.
But then he went off the rails. He started hanging out with the thieves and whores of Paris, entertaining them with verse that married higher education and literature to criminal slang and dirty jokes. Of course it was an instant hit. Villon’s poems were among the first things published when the printing press reached France later that century, and they haven’t been out of print since. Villon never saw a penny, being dead by then. Anyway he preferred to make his living by pimping, begging and seeking patronage, with the odd burglary thrown in. After several close brushes with the gallows he disappears in 1463, never to be heard from again.
This is what Hollywood calls “surefire material.”
In fact it was so surefire people didn’t even wait for Hollywood to be invented. In 1901 Justin Huntly McCarthy wrote a historical novel, a romanticized account of Villon’s life. That novel became a play, and that play became a musical, and that musical ran for over five hundred shows on Broadway and toured in England. It was famous for its rousing second-act closer, “Song of the Vagabonds:”
Onward! Onward! Swords against the Foe
Forward! Forward the lily banners go!
Sons of France around us,
Break the chain that bound us,
And to Hell with Burgundy!
That refrain—“To Hell with Burgundy!”-- became a pop-culture catchphrase of the 1920s—a meme transmitted in part by radio, the newfangled World Wide Web of its day.
By this time Hollywood was up and running. They first filmed Huntly’s novel in 1920, as a silent, in which the role of King Louis the XI was played by one Fritz Lieber. Recognize the name? No, it wasn’t the author of the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser series. This was his father, the noted Shakespearean. Lieber père was chosen to play Louis not only for his experience with villains like Richard III but also for being uncommonly long-limbed: Louis was called “the Spider King” for that reason (among others).
(Ever read Lieber fils’ novel Swords of Lankhmar? Note the character of Glipkerio Kistomerces, autocrat of the city: unnaturally tall, gangly, antic—like Louis. For that matter, note how the Grey Mouser is himself like Villon: slight and swarthy, an urban footpad, not an outdoorsy outlaw like Robin Hood. This is not coincidence. )
And the name of Huntly’s novel, and of the play it inspired, and the movie that inspired?
Then In 1938 Warner Brothers was set to roll out its summer blockbuster, The Adventures of Robin Hood. It had swashbuckling adventure, plus Olivia deHavilland for the leading lady, Basil Rathbone as the heavy, and Errol Flynn, star of the smash hit Captain Blood, as the male lead. And it was a remake of the 1922 silent version, with Douglas Fairbanks, which had also been a smash hit.** Who could compete with that?
Answer: Paramount. Having got wind of Warner’s plans they decided to remake the 1920 silent version of If I Were King. So it also had swashbuckling adventure, plus Francis Dee for the leading lady, and, er, Basil Rathbone as the heavy. And their male lead was the thinking man’s action hero: Ronald Colman, star of The Prisoner of Zenda and A Tale of Two Cities.
(Here’s an experiment: pretend you’re an actor and that you’re reciting the “It is a far, far better thing I do…” speech. Say it out loud. Notice the accent and intonation you’re using? It’s the same one you hear when you think of “Ah, if I were king…” That’s Ronald Colman.)
But Paramount’s secret weapon was their script: it was by Preston Sturges, who had scripted The Invisible Man (yes, yes, WHICH YOU PROBABLY HAVEN’T SEEN HAR HAR) and had gotten an unheard-of sum for being the sole writer on the hit The Power and the Glory.*** He was famous for turning out work that was witty and literate yet widely popular as well, and his script would incorporate whole chunks of Villon’s poetry—most of it in Rossetti’s translation. This was what a summer blockbuster was like in 1938.
There was one key scene that turned on an extended passage of verse: Villon, dragged unwillingly to Mass by his uncle, observes Katherine de Vaucelles in church as well. Smitten with love, he surreptitiously writes a poem while his uncle prays:
Outside he pleads with her to stop and listen:
If I were king---ah love, if I were king!
What tributary nations would I bring
To stoop before your sceptre and to swear
Allegiance to you lips and eyes and hair.
Beneath your feet what treasures I would fling:
The stars should be your pearls upon a string,
The world a ruby for your finger ring,
And you should have the sun and moon to wear
If I were king.
Let these wild dreams and wilder words take wing,
Deep in the woods I hear a shepherd sing
A simple ballad to a sylvan air,
Of love that ever finds your face more fair.
I could not give you any godlier thing
If I were king.
That sounds like it should be one of Villon’s poems (it is, in fact, an excruciatingly correct rondeau cinquain, a verse-form common in 15th-century France) Or at least one of Rossetti’s. But it’s not. It’s from Huntley’s 1901 novel and he wrote it for the character of Villon, as something Villon might very well have said.
In other words, it’s a fanfic. Or a pastiche as they called it back then.
So anyway, who won the matchup? Well, If I Were King had Ronald Coleman reciting poetry in authentic period style. Robin Hood had Errol Flynn swinging on vines in Technicolor.
Yeah, it wasn’t even close.
It might have been a more interesting contest if Paramount had gotten the movie done in time to go head-to-head with Warner Brothers that summer. As it was Robin Hood premiered in May, while If I Were King came out in November. Not that Paramount did badly : the film received four Oscar nominations and did plenty to advance the careers of everyone who worked on it--including Edith Head, the costume designer, who eventually won more Oscars than any other woman and served as the model for:
Some kinda cultural figure we don't know a lot about
Sturges went on to win the first-ever Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1940, for The Great McGinty, and was for awhile the third-highest-paid man in America. One of the things he always demanded of the studios he worked for, was his right to use the character actors and bit-part players of his early movies whenever possible. They had been with him on the way up and he wanted to make sure they were not forgotten.
And Colman? He was nominated for four Oscars, finally winning one in 1947 for his star turn in A Double Life (which also got him a Golden Globe). He went on to do all sorts of work, turning to radio when he grew too old to portray the swashbuckler. Did you know he once starred in a radio adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" ?
One of his last gigs was The Halls of Ivy, a show that ran on CBS radio 1950-52 and on TV 1954-55. In it Colman played the president of a small Midwestern liberal arts college who spent every episode dealing with the various eccentrics, Bohemians and local yokels of his little community (Huh...“community”...you know, if you wanted to remake The Halls of Ivy nowadays you’d probably want to set it at a community college. Somebody should really look into that…)
If I Were King was restaged for radio several times in the 1940’s, once with Colman reprising his role, and the musical version, The Vagabond King, got a film remake in 1953. It’s still revived for the stage from time to time. I saw one such production in the 1990’s which featured an old friend as Katherine de Vaucelles (sadly, the fellow cast opposite her as Villon sounded exactly like Dudley Do-Right).
But the figure of François Villon has largely faded from popular imagination, even while that of Robin Hood has been perennially renewed. The English-speaking world seems to prefer its outlaws muscular and woodsy. However young people today are increasingly urban and celebrate urban antiheroes in their art and entertainment. So it may yet be time to revisit the story, once so well-known, that left one lasting echo in our language: If I were king…
For the snows of yester-year do, after all, come ‘round again:
* quod vide—Latin for “remember this, it’s important later.”
** Hollywood’s fondness for remakes is almost as old as Hollywood. Then again, “sequelitis” has been around for over four hundred years .
***Also, his mother had an affair with Alistair Crowley. You can’t make this stuff up.
1. I love you.
2. And here I was convinced those verses were by Villon! Amazing!
3. No, seriously, you are amazing. I'd happily buy a book of slices of witty erudition like this.
4. I know what I'm watching on movie night[1].
5. One minor nitpick: q.v. is quod vide, surely? 'Which see." Which is less 'important later' and more the equivalent of coloring something blue on a Wiki. Quo vadis? is 'where are you going?' Also the title of a book by Henryk Sienkiewicz, which is how I originally came across the phrase when I was but a wee lad (I'm Slavic. We're legally mandated to read Sienkiewicz).
[1] No I haven't seen it. Yes, I am an unlettered barbarian. You try getting a 1938 American movie where I live.
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Actually it just occurred to me: Or was that expansion/translation of 'q.v.' a really obscure joke I'm not nearly clever enough to get?
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YES. YES THAT IS WHAT I MEANT. WHAT I MEANT IS A PRIVATE JOKE BETWEEN YOU AND I. I HAVE CHANGED IT NOW SO THAT WE DO NOT HAVE TO SHARE THE JOKE WITH ANYONE ELSE. YES. YOU ARE A VERY PERCEPTIVE READER
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Thank you very kindly! Check out the links if you haven't already (just added one for Fritz Lieber Sr.)
Odie Cologne was my introduction to Colman's vocal style--I used to watch that cartoon when I was very small and my parents would often point out the voice (If I Were King is one of their favorite movies, you see).
Then there was that Looney Tunes cartoon where the chickenhawk is trying to teach his big, dumb nephew how to catch chickens. The chickenhawk has the Colman voice. There's also a gag involving a bomb and the line "I learned that in London, during the Blitz..."
My god, I should have known that Photo Finish and Edna Mode had to be based on someone, and yet, it never occurred to me.
Have they ever said that Photo Finish was based on her? I want to add that to Wikipedia's article about Edith Head.
Because you know, being referenced in MLP is totally relevant.
2921906 MLP wiki says that Photo Finish is based on Anna Wintour:
img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110404061836/mlp/images/a/aa/FANMADE_Side-by-side_comparison_of_Anna_Wintour_and_Photo_Finish.png
Holy carp! I frikkin' love Villon, but I've never head of the novel or movie. Thank you so much for the heads-up!
I can't find the movie on Amazon Instant or Netflix, but the novel is free on kindle: If I Were King
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Well, if that comes from Hasbro, then that's who she is. But the bowl-cut hair and big glasses, so heavily stylized, can't help but remind me of Edith Head.
And that's who she''ll always be--in my Head-canon (NYUK-NYUK-NYUK!...)
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I have a copy, but it's on VHS. I wanted to watch it with my girlfriend when I visited her next week, and we're going to have to borrow a VHS player out of somebody's office!
Paramount should really offer a remastered edition.
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Oh! Yes! The in-joke! The in-joke about the thing with the guy at the place, which we have developed in our long and storied friendship[1]! How could I have ever forgotten?
[1] I first met Ed in Budapest—on a ship cruising lazily on the the old schön und blau. The orchestra struck up a waltz—yes, exactly the one you imagine. The joke had worn threadbare by then, of course. The Danube is a long river—and our eyes met through our sniper scopes. We were both contracted to eliminate the same Mr. B____, it so turned out. Of course Ed—known only as the Смеясь Убийца to the KGB at the time—was still working for the Agency back then. Anyway, later that evening he tried to kill me with a salad fork between the eight and ninth course at the Gellért, but I never took it personally. Business is business, after all. And he extended me the same courtesy when I had his champagne poisoned—it was an inferior vintage, after all, and it was thus not dishonorable.
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