The Boudoir Diplomat is a 1930 American romantic comedy film

Romantic comedy film

Romantic comedy films are films with light-hearted, humorous plotlines, centered on romantic ideals such as that true love is able to surmount most obstacles. One dictionary definition is "a funny movie, play, or television program about a love story that ends happily"...

 directed by Malcolm St. Clair

Malcolm St. Clair (filmmaker)

Malcolm St. Clair was a Hollywood film director, writer, producer and actor, he was sometimes credited as Mal St Clair. A disciple of Mack Sennett, St. Clair was an actor in many films primarily comedies. At 6'7" he can be seen in such Sennett films as Yankee Doodle in Berlin, towering over the...

 from the play The Command To Love by Fritz Gottwald and Rudolph Lothar.

Plot

Ian Keith

Ian Keith

-Life and career:Born Keith Ross in Boston, Massachusetts, Ian Keith was a veteran character actor of the legitimate theater, and appeared in a variety of colorful roles in silent features of the 1920s. His stage training made him a natural choice for the new "talking pictures"; he played John...

 plays a French military attaché in Madrid

Madrid

Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...

 who romantically pursues the wives of various government officials. Betty Compson

Betty Compson

Betty Compson was an American actress. Born Eleanor Luicime Compson in Beaver, Utah, she had an extensive film career. Her father died when she was young, and she was forced to drop out of school and earn a living for herself and her mother...

 and Mary Duncan

Mary Duncan

Mary Duncan was an American actress.She began her career as a child actress playing on the Broadway stage from 1910. In 1926 she played the daughter "Poppy" in the smash hit and controversial play The Shanghai Gesture. Florence Reed played her mother called Mother Goddam in which Reed kills Duncan...

 play the objects of his attention.

Release

The film opened to much fan-fare on December 5, 1930. According to Mordaunt Hall

Mordaunt Hall

Mordaunt Hall was the first regularly assigned motion picture critic for The New York Times, from October 1924 to September 1934....

's review of the film, the lobby in New York's showcase theater, the Globe, was elaborately decorated for the film's run "with pink silk and photographs with violet borders."

Alternate Version

The film was remade during production into three alternate-language versions. Boudoir diplomatique was the French language version, starring Iván Petrovich and Arlette Marchal. It was directed by Marcel De Sano. It was released some time in 1931, and is not likely to have been screened publicly in the United States.

A Spanish-language version of Boudoir Diplomat was released on February 13, 1931 as Don Juan diplomático. It was co-directed by George Melford

George Melford

George H. Melford was an American stage and film actor, director, producer, and screenwriter.-Career:...

 (who would become famous for his work on the legendary Dracula

Dracula (Spanish-language version)

Drácula is a 1931 American Spanish-language horror film directed by George Melford. It is an adaptation of the 1897 novel of the same name by Bram Stoker and was filmed during the night on the same sets that were being used for the 1931 English-language film of the same name...

) with Enrique Tovar Ávalos

Enrique Tovar Ávalos

Enrique Tovar Ávalos was a Mexican film director notable for remaking several Universal Horror films into Spanish language versions. These include La Voluntad del muerto and Drácula ....

, and stars Miguel Faust Rocha, Lia Torá and Celia Montalván.

Liebe auf Befehl, co-directed by Johannes Riemann and Ernst L. Frank, was the German-language version. It starred Riemann along with Tala Birell as 'Marie' and Olga Tschechowa as 'Manuela.'