It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

I was really looking forward to this, my third Guitry.. I'd liked the other two, and I'm a bit of a history buff.. so it should be a winner...I almost gave up in the first hour.. I found it very dry and dull... but all of a sudden, once the three were dispatched on their quest, it improved dramatically. There was sparkle, wit and interest that seemed to be missing from the first half (Which felt like a slow plod through history)Perhaps I just happened to tune in.. So my apologies for the poor '5' score.

A delight! This is kind of the film I was hoping to see last year when I watched Guitry's Story of a Cheat, which I had heard about for years prior to its becoming available. I liked that film quite a bit, but there was a tinge of disappointment in that it didn't live up to my expectations. The Pearls of the Crown, though, was just brilliant. Guitry and his wife Jacqueline Delubac play multiple roles throughout a 400 year timespan. In the present they play a historian and his wife. Guitry is telling Delubac the story of the pearls in the crown of England. These pearls came from Mary Queen of Scots' necklace, which in turn came from a wedding gift to Catherine de Medici from the Pope. Guitry tells the story of the pearls' origin, and also of their theft the night Mary Stuart was executed. The four pearls that were recovered from the thieves went into the crown, and the three others were never found. Soon Guitry teams up with British and Italian counterparts and the three of them set out on a mission to find the remaining three pearls. This film moves back and forth through time with the grace of a ballerina. Arletty appears in one of the more outrageous bits of the film, as an Abyssinian queen (and, yes, she plays it in blackface).

"The Pearls of the Crown" is a very frustrating movie to watch. It looks very nice--with lovely costumes, nice acting and some gorgeous sets. But, unfortunately, it comes across as a very bad history lesson--so jam-packed full of characters and events from the last five hundred years that it made my head reel--and I am a retired history teacher!Sacha Guitry was quite the auteur here--co-writing, directing and starring (in several roles) in this film. He was a talented man and did some lovely films. This, unfortunately, is not a particularly good one. The film is the history of a set of perfectly matched very large pear-shaped pearls. These pearls pass through LOTS of hands and the film is sure to show each and every one in a long, long series of vignettes. The first one is very long and well done--the other 3722348 are all too brief and hit you like an out of control freight train! All this is strung together with a plot of a man (Guitry) and two others who are in search of these illusive pearls. Even more episodic than "The Story of Mankind"--this one NEVER engaged me and only got worse as the film progressed. A clear misfire.By the way, get a load of the Abyssinian queen--she's some white lady covered in copious amounts of dark paint.

Sacha Guitry's movies probably don't show up in college courses on French film. But then again, neither, I suspect, do Marcel Pagnol's, which says a lot about such courses. This movie, Les perles de la couronne, is not a great movie, by a long shot. It is, however, an extremely funny one. It is a whirlwind tour of French history, and the characters going flying by, most without development or even much dialogue. Acting, except in a few magisterial cases (Raimu), is non-existent. What you do get is a brilliant narrative delivered by its brilliant author, Sacha Guitry. He is nothing to look at - though he was married to a succession of some of the most beautiful women in French theater and cinema - but he knows how to read his own words. Cynical to the extreme, but very funny.Other than that, most of the women in this movie are remarkably beautiful to look at.And you get to see Raimu in his heyday. What more could you ask, after you've worn out your copies of Marius, La femme du boulanger, La fille du puisetier, and the other masterpieces he made with Pagnol? This is basically an extremely funny history lesson, history as it should be taught but seldom is.Definitely a movie for everyone, including and maybe even especially for those who have been fed a dull diet of "important" French cinema. The camera work may be nothing to write home about here, but the narration is a stitch.