Movie Review: The Princess Comes Across

The Princess Comes Across (1936)
directed by William K. Howard, starring Carole Lombard, Fred MacMurrray

(Note: This is my entry for the Carole-tennial (+3) Blogathon, hosted by Vincent at Carole and Co.)

Every reporter, radio announcer, and columnist in town is talking about only one thing: the arrival of Princess Olga of Sweden (Carole Lombard). The princess is on board the prestigious ocean liner Mammoth, on her way to begin a lucrative Hollywood career. Everyone on the ship is instantly captivated by this elegant Swedish royal. And the most infatuated of them all is King Mantell (Fred MacMurray), a concertina-playing bandleader, who is determined to shake this princess down from her ivory tower. But Olga and Mantell aren't the only notable passengers. Five celebrated detectives are also on board, en route to an international police detectives' conference. But before these gentlemen can even finish introductions, they are informed that an escaped convict has stowed away on the ocean liner. He could be anywhere or anyone.

As if princesses, concertinas, and convicts weren't enough, a fourth complication arrives in the form of Robert Darcy (Porter Hall), a shifty-eyed blackmailer, who says he's got the goods on three people. He knows that Mantell did a stretch in jail. He also knows that Princess Olga is no princess at all--she's Wanda Nash from Brooklyn, trying to pass herself off as royalty in order to get a film career. He puts the squeeze on King and Wanda, but before he can reveal his third victim, Darcy ends up murdered.

Now, it's up to the quintet of detectives, as well as a concertina player and a fake princess, to solve the mystery and find out the killer. But can King and Wanda find the killer, keep their secrets, and manage to avoid falling in love? It's going to be quite a voyage.

To co-opt a line from The Sound of Music, how do you solve a problem like The Princess Comes Across? Here's a film that is mildly funny, mildly romantic, has a very mild murder mystery that takes over the second act, and ends on a note of mild abandon. Trying to review it is like fighting your way through a sea of tapioca. It's never bad and occasionally it's quite good, but that's about all that can be said for it. However, no self-respecting film critic ever let mediocrity stand in the way of verbosity, so I'm going to tackle it anyway.

The Princess Comes Across stands out from the rest of Carole Lombard's Paramount comedies by virtue of not being a pure comedy. It was a deliberate attempt at a genre mash-up: a cross between those giddy Paramount romances and the classics 30s whodunnits. The filmmakers opt for some jarring shifts in tone. The beginning of the film is pure screwball, with Lombard doing a killer Greta Garbo parody as the counterfeit Swedish princess. But halfway through the film, the murder mystery angle takes center stage and Lombard's antics quiet down (her discovery of the dead body is played dead serious, with the camera zooming in on her shadowed, horrified face). Compared to another comedy-mystery like The Thin Man, The Princess Comes Across is much more serious in tone. When Nick and Nora are threatened, they laugh it off. When Lombard and MacMurray are threatened, they are genuinely scared.

I have a weakness for films that combine different genres. When done right, they're exciting in their unpredictability. Unfortunately, The Princess Comes Across never manages to combine its disparate elements and so ultimately it feels like two different films that were hastily stitched together. It might have been a case of too many cooks; the film had at least six screenwriters on board. A strong director could have guided the film to consistency but The Princess Comes Across was left in the hands of William K. Howard, a dependable but hardly illustrious craftsman (his most significant directing credit was The Power and the Glory, often cited as an influence on Citizen Kane). A director like Raoul Walsh would have relished the tonal shifts, a screenwriter like Preston Sturges would have cranked up the screwball insanity, but as it is, the film never jells.

The main reason to see The Princess Comes Across is for Carole Lombard's performance. From the very first moment she appears, swathed in furs, her eyes glazed with her own importance, she owns the movie. The whole "pretend Swedish princess" plotline is merely an excuse for Lombard to parody Greta Garbo and she pulls it off brilliantly,  nailing every far-off stare and trilling laugh. In her first scene, a reporter asks her, "Princess, who is your favorite movie star?" Lombard gazes right through him and answers with regal dignity, "Ve tell you, Mickey Moosey."

The real glory of Carole Lombard's performance isn't the Garbodegook she keeps spouting, but the way she can snap back and forth from elegant Swedish princess to Brooklyn gal in a millisecond. In one scene, she barks at MacMurray to "scram." "What did you say?" he asks. "Oh," she fumbles, "scrom, it means, in Svedish, de interview is ended." In another scene, MacMurray asks her "what a princess fish would do if she ever ran into a concertina player fish" (it makes sense in context). "She would probably svim by him every other time," Lombard answers with a glint in her eye and even through the Swedish mannerisms, you can see her character's sarcasm peeking out.

It's Lombard's intelligence and humor that make Wanda Nash into anything close to a likable character because otherwise, she's a complete twit. Masquerading as a Swedish princess in order to land a Hollywood contract is a spectacularly ludicrous scheme even by romantic comedy standards. Even in the 1930s, it wouldn't have taken more than half an hour for someone to unmask her. In a pure screwball comedy, like the vastly superior Nothing Sacred, Wanda would have been trapped into the deception by a misunderstanding and the lunacy would have spiraled out of her control. Here, we're supposed to accept her as a street-smart gal who apparently never heard of things like "false identity," "lawsuits," or "criminal charges."

Fred MacMurray and Carole Lombard had been paired before, in Mitchell Leisen's Hands Across the Table and they would be paired for a total of four films. When MacMurray first fell into Lombard's capable hands, he was a very, very green leading man, with no idea of how to play comedy. Both Leisen and Lombard had struggled with getting MacMurray to find his inner comic. According to one account, Lombard actually sat on MacMurray's chest at one point, pounding him with her fists and yelling, "Now Uncle Fred, you be funny or I'll pluck your eyebrows out!" Whatever Carole Lombard's methods were, she succeeded in carrying MacMurray along and for the rest of his life, he credited her with being his favorite leading lady.

 

In The Princess Comes Across, Fred MacMurray seems more comfortable than he did in Hands Across the Table; his reactions feel more natural and are timed better. As the concertina-playing bandleader King Mantell, MacMurray is anything but kingly. Here, he's a cocky, boyish smart aleck, who sees nothing wrong in trying to proposition a princess. Hell, he's young and she's blonde and they're on a boat together so why not?

Unfortunately, Lombard and MacMurray can't generate enough heat in The Princess Comes Across to offset the no-sugar, no-salt approach of William K. Howard's direction. He puts them into position and lets them banter--that's about it. Without those long, lustrous Mitchell Leisen closeups, the Lombard-MacMurray chemisty suffers. They're still cute together and the way Lombard openly sizes him up as a potential partner is delicious ("Did you notice those shoulders?" she muses to her horrified companion Lady Gertrude), but there's no urgency to their pairing up. It's a pigtail-pulling kind of romance.

Whenever the film switches focus from Lombard and MacMurray to the five famous detectives, my interest level dropped below freezing. Mainly because the five detectives don't do much to distinguish themselves beyond playing into a few national stereotypes (the Japanese one is very polite, the German is professorial etc.). The only one of real interest is Mischa Auer as the Russian detective, whose sardonic, gallows-humor delivery manages to steal scene after scene. In one such moment, Lombard (as Princess Olga) is telling the detectives about her "uncle" Rudolf. "Poor Uncle Rudy, somebody was always shooting at him," Lombard sighs and Auer tops it with, "In my country, they shoot at everybody's uncle." It's Auer's sheer pop-eyed relish of the line that makes it funny.

The only other character actor to note is Alison Skipworth as Lady Gertrude Allwyn, Lombard's worldly-wise partner in crime. She is pure delight as a woman who keeps up a public front as a grande dame (think Margaret Dumont on Casual Friday), but who, in private, shows her true con-artist colors. Whenever King gets within ten feet of her princess protege, she gives him a laser glare so fierce it could fry eggs. She gets nearly all the good lines, too.

"A concertina. And very vulgar. A definite symbol of the lower classes. Put the thing on the floor and it crawls."

 "You enjoyed the cocktails, didn't you?" (Lombard)
"Well the first five or six, but after that I was bored."

"I don't mind people stepping on my feet, but I do object to them lodging there."

Even with this talented cast, The Princess Comes Across is a slow steady slide from glamorous Paramount comedy to a C-grade murder mystery. Watching this movie is like drinking a glass of champagne only to realize, halfway through, that you were really drinking grape juice. And then as you're draining the bottom, you realize you weren't drinking grape juice, you were really drinking tap water. It's a real shame because there are so many moments where you can feel a better, sharper story bubbling under the surface. Or maybe that's just a mirage.

Carole Lombard is the main reason to see this film. It's her humor, her gestures, and her star power that really make The Princess Comes Across into something worth watching. She may not have been a Swedish princess, but she was truly a princess of comedy.  

Favorite Quote: 

"The story is from a novel entitled Lavender and Old Lace, but the name of the cinema has been changed to... um... She Done Him Plenty."

Favorite Scene:

The best moment, in my opinion, would have to be Carole Lombard dining with the five detectives. It's the last place she wants to be, of course, and you can see the wheels in her head turning as she tries to keep pace with her own deceptions. One of the detectives tells her proudly that he had the honor of meeting one of her grandfathers. "But I have two grandfathers!" Lombard says, trying to stall him. "The one I mean, has the beard," he replies. "Oh that one!" she cries out. "And such a looong beard, ven ve vere children, ve used to sving from it!" Somehow, Lombard delivers the line in a way that is both queenly and ridiculous at the same time. Even when she's cornered, she can't resist having a little fun.

Final Six Words:

Lombard floats, but the film fizzles

Here I acknowledge my profound debt to Dr. Macro and his trove of Lombard photos.

Movie Review: There's Always Tomorrow

There's Always Tomorrow (1956)
directed by Douglas Sirk, starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck

Ah, the fifties. Cozy suburbs, white picket fences, Father Knows Best, happy housewives with pearls and vacuum cleaners, blinkered optimism, conformity, and the worship of the bland.

God, can we put that stereotype to rest? A casual glance at the movies of the time shows that the men and women of the fifties were restless, questioning, and sophisticated. Off the top of my head: Rebel Without a Cause, Imitation of Life, Written on the Wind, All that Heaven Allows, Peyton Place, Picnic, Bigger than Life, A Place in the Sun. And that's just a handful of the films of that time that take a microscope and tweezers to the American Dream. Including of course, today's film, There's Always Tomorrow.

Cliff Groves (Fred MacMurray) is a successful toy manufacturer, married to the lovely Marion (Joan Bennett), and living in a big California home with their three children: teenagers Vinnie and Ellen (William Reynolds and Gigi Perreau) and little Frankie (Judy Nugent). Cliff is a genial man, fond of his family, but feels that he has become stuck in a rut. However, it is impossible to communicate this to his family. His children are uninterested in him, except as a source of money, and his wife doesn't understand why her husband feels the need to take her out on her birthday or to get away from the house. Then suddenly one night, as Cliff is eating dinner alone, wearing an apron and sitting in darkness, a woman from his past (Barbara Stanwyck) appears in the doorway.

Stanwyck plays Norma Vale, once Cliff's co-worker in the toy business, now a proud and independent fashion designer in New York. She's arrived in town and is eager to catch up with her old friend (and the former object of her unrequited love). They spend an evening reminiscing about old times and roaming around Cliff's factory. Cliff is energized by Norma's interest and their shared fondness for the past and when he runs into her again at a resort out of town, he takes the opportunity to do all the things he hasn't done in years: swimming, horseback riding, and just generally having a good time. However, by chance, his square-jawed, scowling son Vinnie happens to see them together at the resort and instantly concludes that his father is having an affair. He enlists the help of his girlfriend Ann (Pat Crowley) and sister Ellen to do battle against what he fears is his father's mid-life crisis. Meanwhile, Cliff is beginning to realize the emptiness of his life and turns more and more to Norma for solace.

One look at the movie still above gives you a fair idea on what kind of movie There's Always Tomorrow is supposed to be: the happily married couple allied against the homewrecker. In Douglas Sirk's hands, however, the film becomes a bitter, achingly sad story about a man trapped in a life that is suffocating him to death. The reviews of the time summed it up as a "sudser" and  "soap opera" which puzzles me a little since most soap operas have a lot more plot than this film, where most of the action takes place within the character's minds, within their changing views of each other. In comparison to Sirk's other films, this one is more like a chamber piece, shot in beautiful, gloomy black-and-white that turns a large suburban house into a Xanadu-like prison.

Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck had been teamed three times before (Remember the Night in 1940, Double Indemnity in 1944, and The Moonlighter in 1953), so when Stanwyck appears suddenly in the doorway, the history between them is palpable. I can't speak for The Moonlighter, but the other MacMurray/Stanwyck films have a weird kind of continuity between them, despite all being of wildly different genres. Remember the Night is straight romance, Double Indemnity is noir, and There's Always Tomorrow is melodrama, but in each film, there's a push and pull with Stanwyck as MacMurray's corrupting influence, tempting him away from the straight and narrow but at the same time, freeing him to do things he's always wanted to do.

It's become standard to say that Fred MacMurray was never better than when he was playing a heel, and it's hard for me to argue with that since both Double Indemnity and The Apartment are two of my all-time favorite movies. In this movie however, he does an excellent job portraying a more shaded good guy, a man who works so hard to conceal his own bitterness that he himself is blind to it until Stanwyck shows up. In order for the film to work, Cliff has to be sympathetic enough that his children's suspicions of his adultery seem outrageous and later, when he really does start to fall for Norma, he must still retain that sympathy. Yet MacMurray manages it. His best moments are in the details, as in a scene at the beginning where Norma asks him if he is happy and Cliff, a beat too late, breaks into a smile and says, "Sure, I'm happy." Or in a later scene where the restless Cliff irritably snaps out his newspaper to cover up the sight of a family portrait where he is conspicuously absent.

Barbara Stanwyck's character is a little more ambiguous in that we never quite learn the depth of her feelings for Cliff. Norma starts out as the fond old friend, gushing over Cliff's achievements and encouraging him to have a little fun. Then, as Cliff's suspicious children begin to circle around them and Cliff begins to ask for more and more time with her, Norma starts to vacillate. She admits that she loved Cliff twenty years ago and the intensity of his response to her now seems to touch her. But does she really share his longing? We see Norma at her own busy store (unlike Cliff's nearly empty warehouse, she's surrounded by people), fully in her element in a way that Cliff never is. Cliff's wife Marion at one point suggests to him that Norma is obviously very lonely, but Stanwyck's performance has an intelligence and impatience with sentiment that defies any cliches about love-deprived career women. "You have a wonderful life with Marion and the children," Norma tells Cliff, as if trying to convince herself as well as him. Then suddenly she straightens and the old, Stanwyck-style snap comes into her voice. "And I too have a life."

The other third of this triangle is Cliff's wife Marion, played by Joan Bennett, and let me get one thing out of the way right now. I will never forgive 1950s Hollywood for turning Joan Bennett from this:

into this.

Gorgeous, sexy Joan, why on earth did they start putting you in mother roles? There's a moment in this film that hurts me, when Norma tries to persuade Marion to take home a stylish dress, one of Norma's designs. Marion comes out in a black and white number that suddenly reveals Joan Bennett's slim shoulders and tiny waist and then Marion smiles and says, "I'm afraid it's much too youthful for me."


Her character in this film is a miracle of smiling, maternal equanimity. Nothing can shake this woman from her state of torpor. Whenever she says something, she oozes understanding. After a passionate speech from her husband about how he feels just like a wind-up robot, working only to pay the bills, Marion says, "I know it's expensive, with the children, but I do try." Whenever Cliff does seem on the verge of getting through to her, one of her children calls and she rushes off to soothe them. Unlike the energetic, wide-awake Norma, Marion is constantly shown snuggling into bed or saying how sleepy she is. I kept hoping those invitations to sleep (delivered in Bennett's still sexy, knowing voice) might turn into something else but no dice. Marion is a puzzle. What is her inner life?

Movies that strike out against the rules and regulations of the comfortable suburban life usually have a Greek chorus of naysayers and society watchdogs that try to herd the rebels right back into respectability. It was a surprise for me to look back at this film and realize that said chorus is entirely absent from this movie. There are no snooty friends with teacups, no businessmen with briefcases, no outsiders at all. The voice of repression comes not from the outside but from the inside, as Cliff's children come to the conclusion that Norma is a threat that must be neutralized.

These children are just abominable. Cliff's relationship with them can be read in one brilliant sequence where he comes home only to be shushed by the glare of his teenage son, talking on the telephone. Later, as Cliff tries to talk with them, they find various excuses to get out of the house, only pausing to hit him up for money. Of course, if ignoring your parents was a crime, I'm sure most of us would have earned a stretch in the pen. It's when they jump to the conclusion that Cliff is having an affair that they really begin to be horrible. For all their hand-wringing, it's clear that they're actually revelling in their own suspicions. There's a suppressed thrill to their snooping on their father and their whispered conferences on what to do about the situation, like they're playing out a spy game. When Vinnie's girlfriend questions his actions, he snaps that she doesn't know the ways of the world, but it becomes evident that Vinnie himself isn't too clear on just what these ways of the world are.

Without spoiling the ending of this film, let me just say that it is one of the most depressing Code-mandated "happy endings" that I have ever seen. Sirk was a master at subversion and this film is no exception, taking what could have been a simple tale of a middle-aged man's attempt to regain his youth and making it utterly heartbreaking.

Favorite Quote:

"Love is a very reckless thing. Maybe it isn't even a good thing."

Favorite Scene:

Cliff takes Norma into the deserted factory to show her around. This is the only place he has, outside of his home. After some conversation and much oohing and ahhing on Norma's part, they come to his latest toy, Rex the Robot. Rex walks stiffly down the table, with the sing-song chant:

I'm Rex. The robot. 
The mechanical man. 
Push me and steer me wherever you can.

                                                                               

Norma and Cliff laugh and move on to an old toy they designed together twenty years ago, a musical toy based on an old organ grinder they'd seen years ago. It brings back good memories even if they only ever sold two copies. Norma can't remember the song so Cliff turns a crank and the music begins, a tinkly version of "Blue Moon."

Their faces light up and if you know the lyrics to "Blue Moon," you know then exactly what Norma will come to mean to Cliff. And if you glance over at Rex the Robot, his latest toy, you know what his future will be.

Final Six Words:

Haunting, sharp-edged story of discontent