The Swan (1956)

What the trade papers reported

Variety’s issue of 4 Apr 1956 ran the headline “HAS ANYBODY NOT SEEN KELLY?” and gave the Monaco wedding dates as April 17-18. It reported about 1,000 applications for press accreditation from around the world. Variety also reported that month that CBS-TV would air a half-hour wedding special on April 21, sponsored by Maybelline, and a travel list put Grace Kelly and Brian Aherne among those bound from New York to Europe.

The Canadian Film Weekly of 12 Oct 1955 called Molnár’s play “famous” and said the all-star cast included Jourdan, Aherne and Agnes Moorehead. The Canadian Moving Picture Digest of 13 Aug 1955 had carried an item saying Jourdan was set for a leading role, and it summarized the story as a tutor’s love for a princess. The same item named the picture as a Metro production starring Kelly.

Later accounts

Later accounts disagree on the film’s place in Kelly’s career. Wikipedia’s entry on Jourdan calls The Swan her last film, while its entry on Guinness calls it her penultimate role. Its biography of Grace Kelly gives her final role as High Society, released in July 1956. The same biography gives different wedding dates from Variety’s, with the civil ceremony on April 18 and the church ceremony the following day.

The accounts of how Kelly met Rainier also differ in detail. Wikipedia’s film entry says she visited Cannes later in May 1955, after the rights sale, and met the prince there. Its biography of Kelly places her Cannes delegation in April 1955 and dates the meeting to May 6, 1955, at the palace in Monaco.

MGM’s records, as Wikipedia reports them, show earnings of $1,986,000 elsewhere and $1,763,000 in the US and Canada. The Film Score Monthly label issued the complete score on CD in 2004. Bronislau Kaper composed it and Johnny Green conducted it.

Vidor said the filmmakers followed the romance between Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend closely. Had the couple married, he said, the production would have considered “changing our ending.” As it was, he said, the outcome made the picture “a new, modern story.” Wikipedia reports these remarks without dating them.

Wikipedia’s later account also fills in the casting of Albert. It says Rex Harrison could not reach terms with the studio after he and Jourdan, who had made a screen test in Paris, held the leads by August 1955, and that Guinness signed by the end of that month. The entry adds that Dore Schary, MGM’s head of production, also announced a plan to remake The Barretts of Wimpole Street with Kelly.

On June 9, 1950, according to Wikipedia’s film entry, Kelly had appeared in a CBS Television production of The Swan, and Variety called her performance “masterful.” Her biography records a seven-year MGM contract at $850 a week, signed when she was given her role before the Mogambo production. It also says MGM loaned her to Paramount for the fifth time for To Catch a Thief.

The other versions

Eva Le Gallienne, Philip Merivale and Basil Rathbone played the leads when the piece reached Broadway in 1923, according to Wikipedia. The source is Molnár’s 1914 Hungarian play. Rod La Rocque, Lillian Gish and Conrad Nagel starred in One Romantic Night (1930), directed by Paul Stein.

The endings of the screen versions differ. Ricardo Cortez played the tutor, Adolphe Menjou the prince and Frances Howard the princess in the 1925 silent, directed by Dimitri Buchowetzki, which closes on Alexandra and the tutor kissing, with marriage expected. In the 1956 plot, Agi leaves the mansion without her and she walks back inside on Albert’s arm.