The Princess Comes Across (Paramount, 1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Friday, August 18) afternoon I put on Turner Classic Movies because they were doing their “Summer Under the Stars” tribute – during every day in August they devote their entire lineup to films with a single star – to Carole Lombard. At 5 p.m. yesterday they showed a movie I’d literally never heard of before, The Princess Came Across, directed by William K. Howard at Paramount in 1936 and with a convoluted history both in the writing and the acting. Apparently the story started out as a novel called A Halálkabin by Laszlo Aigner and Louis Acze, though they took a joint writing credit as “Louis Lucien Rogger.” It seems to have got cross-bred with an “original” story by Philip MacDonald, and the final film lists four more writers besides “Rogger” and MacDonald: Walter DeLeon, Francis Martin, Don Martin and Frank Butler. The film’s imdb.com page also lists Claude Binyon and J. B. Priestley (of all people!) as uncredited contributors. That’s nine different writers, in case you were trying to keep track, though this film runs against my general-field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers. The Princess Comes Across is actually a delightful movie, an offbeat mixture of screwball comedy and mystery, and was originally called Concertina (after the instrument the male lead plays – more on him later) and designed as the third film for George Raft and Carole Lombard, after the wanna-be musicals Bolero and Rumba. Alas, George Raft’s absurd ego struck again; he resented Lombard’s insistence on having Ted Tetzlaff as the cinematographer, saying that Tetzlaff’s lighting on Rumba favored her over him, and he quit the project (just as later he’d turn down High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity). Paramount replaced Raft with Fred MacMurray (later MacMurray would star in Double Indemnity after Raft turned it down), though this meant a delay in the shooting schedule and the loss of the original director, Harold Young. (That might not have been such a bad thing; the 1934 film The Scarlet Pimpernel is a far less engaging movie than it should have been, and Young’s sluggish direction is largely to blame.)

The Princess Comes Across starts as the ocean liner Mammoth is about to set sail from Paris to New York, and one of the passengers is Princess Olga of Sweden (Carole Lombard). She’s sailing with her much older traveling companion, Lady Gertrude (Alison Skipworth, the great comedienne who co-starred with W. C. Fields three times and also played a sex-changed version of Sydney Greenstreet’s Maltese Falcon villain in the second film of Dashiell Hammett’s story, Satan Met a Lady, also from 1936), only – as we start to suspect well before the writing platoon tells us, the two are phonies. “Princess Olga” is Wanda Nash, a barely making-it chorus girl, and she and Gertrude hit on the idea of passing her off as European royalty so she can get a movie deal from a Hollywood studio. We start to suspect her authenticity when Lombard plays her with the glacial implacability of real-life Swede Greta Garbo, obviously a model for a young American woman trying to pass herself off as a Swedish aristocrat. When she gets on the boat the captain, Nicholls (George Barbier), invites “Princess Olga” to dine with him and everyone on board gives her and Gertrude the red-carpet treatment. Among the other passengers is Joe “King” Mantell (Fred MacMurray), who plays the concertina, sings and leads a treacly-sweet band that’s scheduled to perform at the ship’s concert just before it docks in New York, where he’s due to start a 12-week engagement at a club. Mantell is instantly smitten with “Olga” at first glance, which happens when he’s rudely asked to leave the Mammoth’s “Royal Suite” so she can have it. Looking for an excuse to see her again, he has his sidekick Benton (William Frawley, who like MacMurray would go on to a legendary 1950’s or 1960’s TV sitcom: MacMurray as Steve Douglas on My Three Sons and Frawley as Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy) steal her purse so he can make a big show of returning it to her – only he drops it in a fish tank and, when he retrieves it, he realizes that among the now-wet items he recovers from the purse is a roll of American money. So he, at least, is onto her masquerade.

So, as it turns out, is blackmailer Darcy (Porter Hall), who threatens to reveal that Mantell once served a year in prison before he got out and became a bandleader. In a plot twist that eerily anticipates the real-life career of Merle Haggard, Mantell says his prison term was actually the best thing that happened to him; one of his fellow prisoners taught him the concertina and this gave him music as an alternative career to either staying crooked or a menial job. But Darcy tells Mantell that there are two other people on the boat he intends to blackmail; one is Princess Olga, t/n Wanda Nash (who’s also had some brushes with the law and a criminal record in her past), and the third is an escaped murderer who fled Paris and is now hiding somewhere on the ship. There’s also a convention of five police detectives from various countries – Lorel from Paris (Douglass Dumbrille), Cragg from London (Lumsden Hare), Steindorff from Munich (Sig Rumann – so two cast members in this movie have Marx Brothers connections, including at least one Marx movie, A Day at the Races, in which they both appeared), Morevich from St. Petersburg (Mischa Auer) and Kawati from Tokyo (Tetsu Komai). The captain looks askance at their presence because murder always follows them wherever they go, and in this case Darcy is found dead in Olga’s bedroom. Later Steindorff is also found murdered just before he was supposed to have a meeting in his stateroom and announce to his colleagues who the murderer was. Though he doesn’t have any real idea who the killer is, either, Mantell decides to make himself human bait, announcing that he will reveal the identity of the murderer just after his band finishes their big song, “My Concertina,” at the ship’s concert.

He tells Benton to wait for him in lifeboat #23 on the upper deck, only the real killer – [spoiler alert!] “Loral,” who killed the real Loral and posed as him to get on the boat and get away (well, given that Douglass Dumbrille played oily villains in almost all his movies, that’s not that big a surprise) – overpowers Benton and knocks him out before he and Mantell meet. There follows a big fight between Fred MacMurray’s and Douglass Dumbrille’s stunt doubles (director Howard spots Tetzlaff’s camera miles away from the action so it’s obvious the stars are being doubled) until a mysterious stranger (Bradley Page), who stowed away on the ship and we’ve been led to believe was the escaped murderer until he turns out to be a red herring, shoots the fake Loral and saves Mantell’s life. The film ends at the New York docks, where “Princess Olga” is supposed to give a press conference announcing how happy she is to be starring in a Hollywood film, only she reveals her true identity, bolts the event and ends up in Mantell’s arms while Gertrude repeats her tag line from earlier in the movie: “I told you no good ever came from a concertina player!” I would have wanted to see a scene in which the producers of her movie decide to go through with it anyway and advertise it as, “Starring Wanda Nash, the woman who fooled the world!” According to imdb.com, Fred MacMurray did his own singing and concertina playing throughout the movie – before he became an actor, as “Loren MacMurray” (his true name), he’d sung and played saxophone in a dance band called the “Original Memphis Melody Boys,” and if his singing voice doesn’t sound that much like his speaking voice, I’d noticed that on the “Original Memphis Melody Boys” records, too. The Princess Comes Across is an engaging little film which hardly challenged its leads – it’s frustrating to write about Lombard because there are movies (including Victor Halperin’s woefully underrated 1933 thriller Supernatural) that show she had much more depth and range than she got to show in the screwball comedies that made her reputation, and if she hadn’t died in a plane crash on a War Bonds tour in 1942 it’s easy to imagine her as the femme fatale lead in films noir – but put them through their paces well and offered an intriguing mix of genre conventions.