King Phillip is bored with court routine and realizes how expensive it is for the common people to support the royal family. He is upset that his ceremonial role does not enable him to act on his country’s behalf, as it was in order to help his country that he gave up his wife and child years before to ascend the throne. After an attempted assassination convinces him to abdicate for the country’s good and his own, his queen, Margaret, encourages him to return to his first wife Helen, whom he married morganatically and had to divorce eighteen years earlier in order to become king. When he demurs, Margaret leads him to believe that she was once in love with someone else, too. Eagerly, Phillip journeys to France to visit Helen. He is surprised to find that she no longer lives in their simple cottage, but has purchased an enormous palace. Expecting an intimate lunch with Helen and their daughter Millicent, who was three months old when he left, Phillip is disappointed to see that Helen has invited many people to meet him. Helen tells Phillip that Millicent is in love with a mechanic, John Kent, of whom she disapproves. Phillip meets John by accident during a trip to his old home and, after a demonstration of John’s invention, is convinced that he is a talented inventor. He cannot change Helen’s mind about the young man, however. As they are to remarry, Helen asks Phillip for the gift of an expensive tiara. On the trip he takes to purchase it, Phillip runs into Margaret, and she invites him to visit her at her new home. He learns that she was never in love with another man and spends such a pleasant afternoon with her that he misses his train and wires Helen that he will be home late. Helen does not want to miss a party that night, so she is escorted there by Mac Barstow. Meanwhile, the royalists in Phillip’s country beg him to return as their king. They are now willing to accept Helen as queen, and Helen is eager to return to the palace. Phillip, on the other hand, suggests that they sell the palace and return to their cottage. When Mac calls on Helen to tell her he is leaving forever because they cannot be together, Phillip realizes that Helen is in love with him. He suggests that they part as friends and returns to Margaret, whom he has come to love and with whom he intends to live a simple life. More on Wikipedia or Mubi
Watch The King’s Vacation (1933)
