Champagne for Caesar (1950)

Director: Richard B. Whorf
Writers: Hans Jacoby and Fred Brady
Stars: Ronald Colman, Celeste Holm, Vincent Price, Art Linkletter and Barbara Britton

Index: The First Thirty.

Vincent Price apparently had a serious soft spot for Champagne for Caesar. When I asked his daughter, Victoria Price, to choose two movies from his expansive filmography to review for my Make It a Double project, she immediately chose this one. She said it was his favourite of all his films.

That’s initially a little surprising for a bunch of reasons. It’s not a horror movie, it’s not well known and it’s not a Vincent Price movie per se. He’s third billed after stars Ronald Colman and Celeste Holm, though he does get a small caricature at the bottom of the poster. No, he’s not Caesar. Caesar’s standing on his head.

However, the longer the movie runs and the more frustrated his character gets as a rather odd corporate villain, Burnbridge Waters, the more it becomes obvious just how much fun he was having making it.

Initially, this isn’t about Waters but he is the reason why the story happens, as he owns and runs the Milady Soap Company, the sponsor of a quirky TV quiz show, Masquerade for Money. It has its contestants dress up as characters and their questions are tailored (ha!) accordingly.

Otherwise it works similarly to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in that a correct answer earns money for a contestant and the value doubles each time. The difference is that this is 1950 so the maximum, after half a dozen questions, is $160. Get one wrong, of course, and you’re out with nothing to take home. And trust me, this structure is important.

Enter the lead character, a polymath with a host of degrees who knows everything about everything but is unable to hold down a job in the real world. He’s Beauregard Bottomley and he’s played by Ronald Colman, a British actor best known as a dashing leading man but who had the acting chops to land both the Oscar and the Golden Globe for A Double Life in 1947.

Three years later, he’s Bottomley, who lives with his sister Gwenn, a piano teacher, and an apparently alcoholic parrot, the titular Caesar. He enters Waters’s life when his agency sends him to Milady Soap to interview for a job. He’s overqualified for everything but they think he could be a good fit for a new survey position.

This survey job is Waters’s personal idea so Bottomley is sent up to his office, to find him in a trance, somewhere in a different plane of existence to the rest of the world. He moves in and out of that at will, very possibly to stop people expecting answers from him. Somehow Price manages to not crack up laughing while doing this. It must have been a challenge.

Anyway, Bottomley interviews well until he cracks a joke and, just like that, his chance is gone. Waters hates humour. And off he goes to that different plane once more because he has deemed the conversation over.

As you might expect, Bottomley isn’t happy about this but the movie would end here if not for Masquerade for Money, which he’d recently encountered and dismissed in a scene that’s a porthole into the past.

He wants to watch a show called Adventures in Science, in which presenters plan to bounce a radar ray off the moon, but he doesn’t have a TV because it’s 1950 so he and Gwenn visit the local storeroom and they, along with a bunch of others, watch it there outside. Notably, he’s able to correct a mistake the presenter makes, before it’s corrected on air, thus reinforcing his depth of knowledge and his quick brain.

Masquerade for Money is up next and he stays to hear the first question, which is ridiculously easy. He dismisses the whole thing as puerile, but it comes back to mind after he fails to get the Milady Soap job and so he decides to use it as a unique form of revenge.

So he gets onto the show, suitably costumed as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and answers all six of his questions right. However, he also wants to keep going and the audience is happy to see that, so he gets a seventh right for $320. Waters decides to stretch it out, asking him a single question a week as an easy gimmick to build audience, secure in the knowledge that he’ll eventually fail and go home with nothing.

And... well, you’ll need to watch this joyous movie yourself to figure out what happens. It’s predictable to a degree, but it has a few twists and turns to keep us on the hop and it ends in a very clever way. Also, while it plays out well as a David vs. Goliath battle that’s personal for Bottomley and Waters, it’s also a surprisingly topical look at what people are willing to do in the holy name of audience. That’s as relevant today in our world of Instagram influencers or viral Tiktok videos as it ever was in 1950.

Like the previous couple of Price’s films, I’d seen this one before, but it played just as well on a second viewing because it’s great fun. It’s perhaps surprising to find that it was Price’s favourite film from his long and distinguished career but it wouldn’t be surprising to find it up there with more expected titles.

Colman somehow manages to be a capable geek in 1950 without losing our sympathy, an achievement that relies in part on his charm but mostly on his dry sense of humour, which is, of course, the very thing that sparked the entire story because Waters hated it so much. Irony is a wonderful thing. Before much of the film is done, there are Beauregard Bottomley fan clubs, which is a great feeling.

Celeste Holm is excellent too, but I ought to add that she does not play Beauregard’s sister Gwenn. That’s Barbara Britton, who has a real part to play in the story. She’s a nurse, Flame O’Neill, who Waters hires when Beauregard is sick with a cold, obviously with sinister intent but not quite that sinister. This isn’t a horror movie. She’s almost as knowledgeable as he is and love is a serious distraction. It helps that she was a fantastic actress too, who landed an Oscar in 1947, the same year as Colman, but for Gentleman’s Agreement.

And then there’s Price, who starts out as an eccentric CEO who does eccentric things in an eccentric office, but gradually turns into more of a conventional villain. He never reaches the levels of twirling moustache dastardliness but he does have a deep bag of dirty tricks. There’s a point at which he faints in shock, one of many priceless Price moments in this film.

So it’s a drama and a comedy and a romance and a whole bunch of genres, but it ends up a firm success. What’s perhaps most important is that it’s a firm success because of everyone involved, not just Vincent Price for a change.