Alas, I did not find The Prince and the Showgirl winsome or cute or charming.
I did laugh a few times here and there, but almost always in a sort of incredulous way, like, "Hah! Can you believe that?"
The Prince Regent (Laurence Olivier) of the fictitious kingdom of Carpathia and his teen son, King Nicolas (Jeremy Spenser), arrive in London to attend the coronation of King George V in 1911. The Prince Regent attends a comic opera their first evening in London, with the obvious purpose of choosing a playmate for the evening, possibly for the week. He gets one of his underlings to procure said playmate. It's completely believable and completely icky.
The Prince Regent chooses American actress Elsie Marina (Marilyn Monroe), and his underling asks her to attend a little supper that evening at the Carpathian embassy. At first, Elsie thinks this is an up-and-up invitation to a supper party. She quickly realizes it isn't, and proceeds to predict all the hackneyed lines that the Prince Regent will use to try to seduce her.
It is pretty funny when the Prince Regent uses the exact lines Elsie expected. It is not funny when he plies her with vodka, with the obvious intention of bedding her as soon as she's too drunk to say no. The fact that he doesn't assault her when she actually passes out from all the vodka is, I suppose, a small mark in his favor. But by then, the whole "fifty-year-old man trying to have his way with a thirty-year-old woman" schtick had made my skin crawl so much, I couldn't really get past it.
Make no mistake -- Marilyn Monroe is really cute and funny in this movie. And Laurence Olivier was actually quite funny too. But the whole premise was so distasteful to me that I simply did not enjoy it much. That is purely a personal reaction. Your mileage may absolutely vary.
But I will stick with The Beautician and the Beast, in which a grumpy widowed king slowly falls in love with the woman he hired to teach his children, which is far different from a grumpy widowed king trying to bed a woman he picked up randomly at the theater. And far superior, in my opinion.
Is this movie family friendly? Nope.
