Champagne for Caesar (1950)
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
- When a brainy man named Beauregard Bottomley (Ronald Colman) becomes a contestant on a radio quiz show, he soon racks up $40 million much to the dismay of the show's sponsor, Burnbridge Waters (Vincent Price), who decides he must find a way to throw Beau off his game. Waters hires sexpot Flame O'Neill (Celeste Holm) to distract Beau, but will it work? Art Linkletter co-stars as announcer Happy Hogan in this satire of the game-show business.
- Actors:
- Ronald Colman, Celeste Holm, Vincent Price, Barbara Britton, Art Linkletter, Gabriel Heatter, George Fisher, Byron Foulger, Ellye Marshall, Vicki Raaf, John Eldredge, Lyle Talbot, George Leigh, John Hart
- Directors:
- Richard Whorf
- Producers:
- George Moskov
- Voiced By:
- Mel Blanc
- Writers:
- Frederick Brady, Hans Jacoby
- Genres:
- Classics, Comedy, Romance
- Collections:
- A Brief History of Films About Television: Part 1, A Brief History of Film...
More like Champagne for Caesar
Reviews (1) of Champagne for Caesar
Comedy Satire. - Champagne for Caesar review by Steve
The best of the many satires about tv and radio to emerge after WWII, as Hollywood struck back against the competition. This sends up the vogue for television quiz shows (which were eventually found to be widely fixed). Ronald Colman is the charming, well spoken Beauregard Bottomley, one of those names that only ever occur in golden age comedies.
He is an intellectual and a polymath who despairs at the idiocy of American popular culture and in particular, advertising. He aims to destroy soap boss Vincent Price by winning week after week on the quiz programme he sponsors. Each time the questions get harder. Eventually Bottomley is answering interrogation on Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Correctly.
It turns out Albert Einstein is a regular watcher. In order to destabilise the infallible contestant, Price sends Celeste Holm, a sort of cerebral double agent, to distract him with emotion. The film is extremely entertaining to this point thanks to Colman's ultra-likeable performance, but the possibility that he might be trumped is actually too maddening to be amusing...
There are satirical takedowns of capitalism.... This is quite a clever film. Caesar is Beauregard's parrot who just repeats what he hears, surely a parody of learning without understanding. The film tells us that television is an agent of cultural atrophy, a message that fifties Hollywood was to circulate with enthusiasm.