Review of His Royal Slyness

Mildred Davis, as Thermosan Princess Florell, sighs contentedly as she husks this quote to her American crush (Harold Lloyd, in his "Glasses" mode). Apparently not crediting Mark Twain (author of THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER) in any way for his spin on the royal-commoner look-a-likes theme, who could blame Lloyd? After all, Samuel Clemens had been dead a good decade by the time HIS ROYAL SLYNESS played on the big screen, and Clemens\Twain himself gave scant kudos to Charles Dickens, who created a more heroic nobility impersonator (Sidney Carton) in A TALE OF TWO CITIES long before the creators of Huckleberry Finn and SAFETY LAST! picked up this theme. A story of European royalty and revolution was quite topical in 1920, following the execution of Czar Nicholas II and the rest of the Russian royal family slightly earlier (July 17, 1918, because Nick had destroyed the Russian fleet, executed most of his critics, gotten 3.3 million countrymen killed in WWI, squirreled away a $300 billion personal fortune in 2013 dollars, and been declared an actual saint by the Church of Wall Street). Despite its torn-from-the-headlines nature, however, HIS ROYAL SLYNESS keeps to the lighter side of life, as viewers never think for a minute that "Glasses" is about to be shot or beheaded, no matter what his predicament here.