After completing his university studies, Nickolo returns to the small Swedish town where his grandfather André Gregory works as a barber. Rather than pursue a more elevated profession, he’s determined to work in the hair salon, where he arouses the interests of the town’s young women both by his matinee-idol looks and his knowledge of the latest hairstyles, specifically the shingle and the bob. Sophie Svensson, the inventor of a miraculous patented hair tonic, has snobbish delusions of grandeur and wants her granddaughter Astrid to make an aristocratic match, so she’s troubled by Astrid’s burgeoning romance with Nickolo, whose background isn’t quite what everyone imagines. His grandfather is secretly visited by royalists from the country of Tirania who dream of seeing the once-abolished dynasty return to the throne, and it transpires that Nickolo isn’t a barber’s grandson but the child of the assassinated king of Tirania, brought to Sweden by Gregory to bide time before reclaiming his birthright. Or is he?
Ruritania came very early to Sweden: The Prisoner of Zenda appeared as Fången i Zenda in serialized form in Swedish newspapers in July 1894, just three months after the novel was first serialized in Great Britain, and the translation was published complete later that same year. To our knowledge no study has been done on its impact on the country’s film industry, and the Swedish-German co-production Hans Kungl. Höghet shinglar / Majestät schneidet Bubiköpfe is a late riff on some of the classic themes, not always in a comedic vein. While there’s no doppelgänger, the film does play with mistaken identity and contains a surprising twist at the end (oddly revealed in the Berliner Tageblatt’s review of 27.05.1928; so much for spoilers). Barbers and mythical Balkan kingdoms earlier formed an association in Sydney Chaplin’s ill-fated King, Queen, Joker (1921), which, as Frank Scheide has pointed out, was an important influence on Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. In a more serious vein, the flashback in Hans Kungl. Höghet shinglar showing the palace murder of the king is surely meant to recall the bloody assassination of King Alexander I Obrenović of Serbia and his wife Queen Draga in 1903. For Sweden in particular, royal themes had a special resonance in the late 1920s, when betrothal speculation gripped the nation as several members of the ruling house reached marriageable age. Less than a year before the shooting of the film, Princess Astrid of Sweden married Belgian’s Crown Prince Leopold, a likely clue to the choice of name for the film’s female lead.
Hans Kungl. Höghet shinglar was the last of seven Swedish-German co-productions made by the Isepa company in an attempt to internationalize the Swedish film industry in the late 1920s; outdoor scenes were shot in Sweden while the rest was made in Berlin. Reviews were mostly positive, though the critic for Sweden’s Folkets Dagblad Politiken (14.02.1928) wrote, “This film is neither fish nor fowl. A mixture of American farce and German comedy, of Swedish archipelago comedy and Viennese opera with a touch of American gunplay.” As if in recognition of the ubiquitous nature of Ruritanian themes, the German intertitles changed the country’s name from the neutrally Balkan Tirania to Schnorrkadien (roughly “land of the scroungers”), and the Berliner Tageblatt reviewer, clearly tired of these types of stories, complained, “the miniature conspiracies from Illyria to Schnorrkadien are now sufficiently parodied; it is time to parody the parodies.” The provisional German title Romeo und Julia von heute (Romeo and Juliet of Today) was changed before release; for the screening at the 2019 Bonn Stummfilmtage, Stefan Drößler was able to use the German censorship records to reproduce the original German intertitles.
As with other Isepa co-productions, Hans Kungl. Höghet shinglar features an international all-star cast, including Julius Falkenstein (known from films by Lubitsch, Murnau, and Lang), actress-director Karin Swanström, and the surprisingly young Brita Appelgren, all of 16. The main part of Nickolo was played by the Chilean actor Enrique Rivero (born Riveros, 1906-1954), incongruously touted as the Swedish Valentino; a poem reproduced – likely written for – the Swedish program booklet waxes lyrical: “I have forgotten Gösta Ekman’s blue eyes, / for your South American-Spanish charm.” He made three films in Sweden before finding greater fame working with Jean Renoir, Alberto Cavalcanti, and, most notably, Jean Cocteau in Le Sang d’un poète (1932).

The print  A duplicate negative, downsized to Academy ratio, was made from a nitrate print in 1973; the viewing print was struck from this negative the same year. Due to decomposition of the source material the opening scenes were copied as freeze frames. The original score by Pasquale Perris for the 1928 German release is untraced.

Magnus Rosborn, Jay Weissberg, Amy Sargeant