A fun and light-hearted romp through Tudor England with some good serious moments, too. The Mauch twins, (who later became a film and a sound editor in Hollywood for many years), play Prince Edward and Tom Canty in the delightful Mark Twain story. Errol Flynn is an ideal Myles Hendon, a lover of adventure and his freedom who comes to the rescue of young pauper only to find that he thinks that he's Prince Edward - and he's right! The film has one of those splendid Warner Brothers casts with Claude Rains as a conniving minister, (good practice to play King John the next year), Henry Stephenson as his rival, Montagu Love as a splendid Henry VIII, Alan Hale in his first film with his friend-to-be Flynn, (to whom he loses a swordfight) and Barton McLane as the bad guy's bad guy.
The best scene is the penultimate one where the Prince who is a Pauper has to remember where he put the Great Seal of England with the help of the Pauper who is a Prince and a royal go-fer who has to rush off to the palace each time they come up with a possible location. (Why didn't they just re-introduce the dog who knows which is witch from an earlier scene? I guess that wouldn't have been as much fun.)
The film is, as most of Flynn's films were, enhanced by a splendid score from either Max Steiner or, (as here) Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who used the themes here in his wonderful violin concerto in D Major, Op 35, of which there are several versions on-line, (I love Hillary Hahn's).
Also like so many of Flynn's films, it is ahistorical, especially in the presentation of personalities. Edward was not such a sweet boy as we see here and died very young. Rain's character, the Earl of Herford, became the Lord Protector of England for the first two years of Edward's reign, which began when he was just 10 - the Mauchs were 16, an age Edward never reached. Nor was the Duke of Norfolk the benign figure we see in Henry Stephenson. He never left the Tower during Edward's reign and was certainly not in put charge of anything.
But the writers aren't lying to us: they are just improving on history, as a sculptor improves of a slab of stone.
The best scene is the penultimate one where the Prince who is a Pauper has to remember where he put the Great Seal of England with the help of the Pauper who is a Prince and a royal go-fer who has to rush off to the palace each time they come up with a possible location. (Why didn't they just re-introduce the dog who knows which is witch from an earlier scene? I guess that wouldn't have been as much fun.)
The film is, as most of Flynn's films were, enhanced by a splendid score from either Max Steiner or, (as here) Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who used the themes here in his wonderful violin concerto in D Major, Op 35, of which there are several versions on-line, (I love Hillary Hahn's).
Also like so many of Flynn's films, it is ahistorical, especially in the presentation of personalities. Edward was not such a sweet boy as we see here and died very young. Rain's character, the Earl of Herford, became the Lord Protector of England for the first two years of Edward's reign, which began when he was just 10 - the Mauchs were 16, an age Edward never reached. Nor was the Duke of Norfolk the benign figure we see in Henry Stephenson. He never left the Tower during Edward's reign and was certainly not in put charge of anything.
But the writers aren't lying to us: they are just improving on history, as a sculptor improves of a slab of stone.