Champagne for Caesar - 1950

As television spread across the United States, films began to incorporate this culture-changing phenomenon into cinematic storytelling. Champagne for Caesar centers on the immediate power of television programming to affect people’s lives, especially the life of an unemployable genius (Ronald Colman) who lives with his sister (Barbara Britton). A kind of "living encyclopedia" with a superhuman ability to recall even the most obscure facts, he appears on a television quiz show (despite loathing it on an intellectual level) and begins to amass a fortune. Each week, he refuses to accept a payout of his winnings, instead returning to face increasingly difficult double-or-nothing challenges. His reason for going to such lengths, and for refusing to cash out even as the prize climbs into the millions and threatens to bankrupt the sponsoring company, is simple: revenge.

The motive for his revenge stems from an encounter with the corporation that manufactures Milady Soap, the sponsor of the quiz show. He is offered a job, briefly hired, and then immediately fired by the company’s flamboyant leader, Burnbridge Waters (played by Vincent Price), who dismisses him with the line, "You’re a dreamer, and I’m a doer." The abrupt dismissal comes after Beauregard Bottomley (Ronald Colman) makes a small, humorous remark during their introductory conversation:

Burnbridge Waters: I have an idea. I want to find out what the average man thinks of it. Then when we find out what he thinks of it, we will change his thinking. What I am about to tell you now is very top secret. It ranks with the discovery of electricity and the invention of the wheel. I am thinking of putting on the market an all purpose cake of soap that would also be used to clean teeth.

Bottomley: I see, sort of the foam at the mouth approach, eh?

Burnbridge Waters:You would've started tomorrow morning.

Bottomley: That would've been fine but aren't we using rather a strange tense, "would've"?

Burnbridge Waters: No, Sir, we are not. I loathe humor and you are humorous. ...this is a deadly serious world, this world of business .... You are an improvident grasshopper and I am an industrious squirrel. Nothing personal.

As Bottomley protests about having gained and then abruptly lost the job, Burnbridge Waters (Vincent Price) calmly takes his seat at his corporate desk. Raising one hand into the air, he drifts into a meditative state, staring blankly into space. Bottomley continues to argue and hurl insults, but receives no response. An assistant quietly explains, “It’s no use—he’s no longer on this plane.”

The writing in Champagne for Caesar is often clever, and the dialogue is packed with double meanings, zingers, and witty wordplay that pokes fun at American culture circa 1950. However, the storytelling is rather loose, and the humor (whether satirical or farcical) is the only real force propelling the plot forward, aside from Bottomley's laid-back pursuit of vengeance.

At around the 48-minute mark, co-star Celeste Holm is finally introduced into the story, and at that point, the film begins to come together. With her arrival, the movie quickly finds a sense of human balance. Holm plays a beautiful and intelligent woman named Flame O’Neill, who has been hired by the soap company to derail Bottomley by acting as a "distraction."

When Bottomley falls slightly ill with the flu, Flame O’Neill appears at his apartment door dressed as a nurse, claiming she has been sent by the Beauregard Bottomley Fan Clubs to nurse him back to health. She promptly moves in, begins sleeping on a couch in his bedroom (in order to better monitor his condition), and is with him nearly every moment, day and night.

The distraction she provides isn’t simply that she’s an attractive woman in a nurse’s uniform. Instead, her true impact lies in her ability to engage with Bottomley on an intellectual level, debating abstract and rarified topics drawn from the same kinds of books he reads to "put himself to sleep" at night. Naturally, he is soon smitten.

Flame reports back to Burnbridge Waters: "I’ve managed to introduce a rather disorganized state of pleasant chaos. He is uncertain, puzzled, upset, and bewildered."

Now thoroughly distracted, Bottomley must prepare for the next quiz show appearance, where providing the correct answer will, in effect, make him the owner of the radically over-extended soap company — one that failed to place any upper limit on the prize money.

Though part farce, Champagne for Caesar is really a warm satire. It presents Ronald Colman as a dignified intellectual who turns a ridiculous game show backwards against itself, while also portraying a man inexperienced in basic human emotion, ultimately stripped of his protective genius by an unexpected vulnerability.

Told another way, the story could easily be a nightmare, a harsh critique of American pop culture and corporatism. But as written by Hans Jacoby and Frederick Brady, it is warm and human and not particularly deep. The playfully exaggerated character names (seemingly drawn from the same place as Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy comic strip) underscore the film’s satirical edge and an attitude of not taking itself too seriously..

In Champagne for Caesar, "brains" and "beauty" are not opposites but are evenly matched in the film’s central pair, Colman and Celeste Holm. Meanwhile, Vincent Price, as the soap company boss Burnbridge Waters, isn’t merely a cliché of the hard-driving American industrialist. He embodies that archetype but also reveals himself as something of a genius in his own right, extraordinarily eccentric and theatrically unpredictable.

Ironically, the story structure wanderingly resembles that of a television show more than a traditional Hollywood film, a trait it shares with another early 1950s film about TV, The Twonky. If Champagne for Caesar had been deliberately split into a two-part television program, with our other main character (played by Celeste Holm) introduced at the beginning of the second part, it would have made more thematic sense.

Instead, we get an oddly paced, almost Waiting for Godot-like first half, where the narrative seems devoid of any real project other than Colman's goofy revenge. The film finally gels together when Holm and Ronald Colman begin interacting. From that point forward, and in most ways making up for the void at the beginning, Champagne for Caesar becomes a well-done 1950 comedy, built on a screwball foundation and driven by two ace actors (or three, counting Vincent Price) expertly pulling the strings.

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Original Page September 3, 2025