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Captain Eddie Kronen (Eddie Constantine) might be one of the best
marine captains of his day - but he's also an adventurer, drunkard,
gambler and womanizer - and thus out of money most of the time, like right
now ... which is exaclty why he accepts the offer of becoming the admiral
of the fleet (1 battleship) of Dorado - a ministate next to Monte Carlo -
no questions asked. Before he ships Dorado's young queen Marina (Marion
Michael) off to Portugal though to find a suitable husband, he decides to
spend a few more days in Monte Carlo during the carnival for a bit of
partying. Queen Marina is not happy to be shipped off to Portugal to
marry without ever having tasted the real life, so she dresses up as her
maid to have a night on the town. Naturally, Kronen and Marina meet, and
by pretending to really be a maid, she wins over his heart, while he wins
over hers by simply not being a yay-sayer but a man of the world. Eventually,
on Kronen's battleship, he and Marina find all of Dorado's national
treasure with her luggage - which leads them to but one conclusion: The
prime minister wants to smuggle the gold out of the country. Marina
returns to court to try and have the prime minister arrested, but he has
her put under lock and key instead, and since neither Eddie knows Marina's
actually the queen nor anyone in Dorado except for those on court knows
what the queen looks like, he sends his own girlfriend (Barbara Laage)
onto Eddie's ship to pose as the queen - but she makes one fatal mistake
when she steals a pearl necklace off Marina's neck to wear it herself,
since it's the necklace Eddie has given to Marina ... Eddie sees through
the coup the prime minister was planning, and now he, with the one and
only battleship of Dorado at his command, bombs Dorado until the army
deserts, then takes back the country with his handful of sailors and sees
to it that the prime minister is suitably punished. However, in the very
end he leaves without Marina as she belongs to her people now and not to
an unstable adventurer like him. Bomben auf Monte Carlo has
been previously filmed in 1931 with Hans Albers in the lead [click
here], and it wasn't a particularly great film back then. This
remake, despite putting a different focus on the source material, has
surprisingly little new to offer, in fact it seems positively
old-fashioned even for 1960, and the fact that it didn't have the budget
to properly bring its story to the screen, the dance sequences could have
been better choreographed, the jokes aren't really good, and the politics
that form the groundworks of this are a bit too fairy-tale simplistic all
make this ... well, a film that's the funniest when it doesn't try to be.
By far not on top of the so-bad-it's-good charts (not even in the German Schlagerfilm
category), but worth a chuckle or two, maybe.
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