All the King's Horses Review: A Silly, Dusty 1930s Swap-Comedy That's Actually Fun

If you have ninety minutes to waste on a Sunday and love seeing 1930s actors run around in fake moustaches, All the King's Horses is a pretty fun time. But if you hate silly mistaken-identity plots where nobody recognizes their own husband, you should probably run away fast. 🏃‍♂️

The whole thing is basically The Prisoner of Zenda but with songs and way more silly faces. Carl Brisson plays both the movie star, Carlo, and the King of Langenstein, who are spitting images of each other.

Naturally, they swap places because the King wants to go party in Paris, and Carlo has to pretend to rule a country. It is the kind of movie where you just have to turn your brain completely off.

I mean, the King's own wife, played by Mary Ellis, doesn't even notice her husband has been replaced by a cheerful actor. She just thinks he got much better at singing and cuddling. 🤨

There is a great scene early on where Carlo is trying to figure out how to be royal. He keeps messing up the salutes, and Edward Everett Horton—who plays the frantic adviser—looks like he is about to have a literal heart attack.

Horton is easily the best part of this whole mess. His face does this twitchy thing whenever something goes wrong, and honestly, it goes wrong a lot.

He makes those same worried squeaks he always does, and it works every single time. Eugene Pallette is also here, sounding like he eats gravel for breakfast.

He plays another advisor type, and every time he speaks, it feels like the movie gets 50% louder. It has that same sort of dizzy, silent-era energy you get in The Blooming Angel, where nobody seems to care about logic.

Some of the musical numbers are... well, they are something. They feel less like plot points and more like the director just wanted to show off some big shiny floors.

It reminded me a bit of the random musical breaks in Melodious Moments, where everyone just stops to harmonize for no real reason. There is this one song about a horse that goes on forever.

Like, literally three minutes of people singing to a horse. 🐴 I think I fell asleep for a second during that part, but when I woke up, they were still singing.

The sets look like they were made out of painted cardboard and leftover glitter from a high school prom. You can almost see the walls shaking when someone shuts a door too hard.

But that is part of the charm, isn't it? It has that cheap, cozy studio feel where everyone was probably having lunch together five minutes before the cameras rolled.

I noticed a funny thing in the background of the ballroom scene. One of the extras in a big fancy dress is clearly trying to avoid stepping on a wire on the floor.

She does this wierd little hop-step while trying to look super elegant. Nobody edited that out!

It is those little human moments that make these old dusty films so much fun to watch. If you want a masterpiece, go watch something else.

But if you want to see Edward Everett Horton lose his mind while a Danish singer pretends to be royalty, this is your jam. It is silly, loud, and definately too long in the middle, but I kind of loved it anyway.