Resa d'amore

Combining the elements of a great screwball comedy with a murder mystery,Paramount again cast the great team of Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray.Carole a down-on-her-luck publicity hungry actress enlists the aid of wise-cracking hefty Alison Skipworth and together they sail aboard a luxury liner en route to America.Lombard pretending to a Swedish princess befriends Fred MacMurray and pal William Frawley and all four form an uneasy alliance.Matters become complicated when Carole is suspected of murdering a blackmailer who knew her in Brooklyn.A pack of zany international detectives attempt to solve the crime in their bumbling fashion while MacMurray tries to find the murderer before he strikes again. This fine little comedy is ably directed William K. Howard with a wonderful supporting cast led by George Barbier(ship captain) suspects Porter Hall,Douglas Dumbrille,and egocentric detectives Sig Rumann,Mischa Auer,and Tetsu Komai.Surefire fun.

Somehow, when thinking of movie couples in the golden age of film, Carole Lombard's partnership with Fred MacMurray gets overlooked. Not as glamorous as Tracy and Hepburn, Hepburn and Grant, Grant and Dunne, Eddy and MacDonald, MacDonald and Chevalier, Bogart and Bacall, it still got tremendous mileage in comedies (HANDS ACROSS THE TABLE, TRUE CONFESSIONS), comic thrillers (THE PRINCESS COMES ACROSS), and straight drama (SWING HIGH, SWING LOW). Lombard had the ability to make the film's activities soar by her zaniness. MacMurray managed to anchor the film down by his normality (and in TRUE CONFESSIONS uses this normality against itself - by taking himself too seriously).

THE PRINCESS COMES ACROSS made fun of thrillers (although the dangers involved are not made funny), and of the culture of publicity that the public thrives on. Lombard has the looks and talents to make it in movies, but nobody cares. With the help of Alison Skipworth she pretends she is Princess Olga of Sweden and she wants to act in movies. Besides the spoofing of Garbo, Lombard is counting on the vast publicity from the media to get her the million dollar contract she wants. Oddly enough, the Swedish royal family does not seem to care that a fraud is being perpetrated by Lombard and Skipworth at their expense. But we have to make some concession to the plot.

MacMurray is a well known musician (a concertina player of all things) and orchestra leader. He and his manager pal, William Frawley, are on the boat as well, and MacMurray is very interested in the beautiful, but snobbish Princess. However, he has another problem. MacMurray is an honest fellow, but he did one bad thing, and he is being pursued by an obnoxious little weasel (played superbly by Porter Hall) who is waiting for a big payoff from the musician. He also seems to know the truth about the Princess. MacMurray refuses to pay, and Hall promises him some problems. The ship has several internationally known detectives on board (among them are Mischa Auer, Sig Ruman, and Douglas Dumbrille), and Hall sees one of the detectives and we see him approach to talk to him. Shortly afterward Hall is found murdered. On top of this, there is word (sent to the ship) that an escaped murderer is thought to be aboard (shades of Dr. Crippen), and we do see a strange little stowaway from time to time.

The film goes on to a second murder, a set of different rival detectives trying to solve the case, and MacMurray deciding to step in to clear himself and the Princess. The conclusion is quiet satisfactory.

With it's cast of expert character actors supporting MacMurray and Lombard's performances, and the clever script, THE PRINCESS COMES ACROSS is a first rate comic thriller. I rate it 9 out of 10.

Comedy, romance and murder mysteries are great on their own. Those three elements together seemed even more appetising and there have been numerous instances where it has worked. The story sounded so great on paper and the cast is a talented one, do like Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray and the two worked very well together in their too few appearances.

This is evident in 'The Princess Comes Across', which is a very good representation of both and of their partnership. It is also a very good, if not quite great, film in its own right, what could have been a basic whodunit is elevated to a greater level by the cast, the clever writing and how the elements are balanced well. The mystery is not exactly a complicated one, but it is wholly diverting and it was a good idea to have enough to keep one guessing without trying to over-complicate.

By all means, 'The Princess Comes Across' is not without faults. For me, at just an hour and a quarter it was a little too short. Would have given it 10 minutes more perhaps.

With a slightly longer length, it would have made the more serious second half less hasty, don't get me wrong there is a lot to enjoy about the second half it just felt a bit rushed at times and the tonal shifts don't always gel and create a disjoint.

However, there is a huge amount to enjoy about 'The Princess Comes Across'. It is especially worth seeing for a wonderful Carole Lombard, exuding glamour and enjoying herself to the hilt, her trademark zaniness and delicacy perfectly captured. Fred MacMurray may not be at his very best, but he is dashing and has amiable comic timing. The supporting cast are all solid, with the best turns coming from a deliciously sardonic Mischa Auer, Porter Hall playing a weasel to perfection and especially a delightful Alison Skipworth relishing some of the film's best lines. They are all efficiently directed and have believable chemistry, Lombard and MacMurray do sparkle together.

It's a visually beautiful film too, it's sumptuously shot with beautiful costumes and the camera clearly loves Lombard. The script is witty and sophisticated in the comedic elements of the first half, which is the better half and the element where 'The Princess Comes Across' scores highest. The romantic element works a charm and for me the mystery was diverting and not too simple or complicated, reservations with it are with it being taken a little too seriously in the second half. The music is like its own character and adds hugely to the film.

Concluding, well worth seeing with Lombard being the biggest attraction. 7/10 Bethany Cox

THE PRINCESS COMES ALONG is a comedy/mystery that unfortunately splits itself in the middle rather than being a mix of both genres throughout the film. It stars Carole Lombard as a girl from Brooklyn who while in England somehow manages to persuade film producers that she is a Princess Olga of Sweden, is signed to a contract and on her way to America to make movies. The movie opens with the excited passengers and press eager to see the Princess board the ship (just how this ruse is successfully pulled off strains credibility, Sweden, after all is a major nation, and surely any allegations that a Princess was going to enter pictures would have quickly been denied and disproved).

Fred MacMurray is a popular bandleader who is also on board and takes a shine to the Princess, attempting to romance her. She is indifferent but when a blackmailer is found dead in her room she becomes warmer to MacMurray's offer of friendship as he and buddy William Frawley remove the body. That still means a murder is loose on board and there's more mayhem in the works before the killer is revealed.

This movie starts out an engaging 1930's romantic comedy with Lombard deliciously parodying Garbo as the faux Royal Highness. Alas, the movie literally turns deadly after the murder and it's pretty much a straightforward murder mystery with a surprise that isn't much of a surprise if you've seen movies of this nature. Nevertheless, the cast does very well with the material, particularly the young Fred MacMurray, quite dashing in his late twenties, and the delicious character actress Alison Skipworth, here cast as the Princess' haughty traveling companion but in truth another unemployed actress and of course the always great Lombard. Months after their triumph in MY MAN GODFREY, Lombard is reunited with Mischa Auer with the latter in a small role as the Russian detective, one of several international detectives who just so happen to be all traveling on board. THE PRINCESS COMES ALONG is not one of the better Lombard films but it's a pleasant 90 minutes and worth at least one viewing.

'The Princess Comes Across' was billed as 'a curious blend of comedy, murder-mystery, romance and music'; the 'curious' is certainly without question, but the degree to which the mix blends is, I feel, open to some doubt.

On the whole this is mainly satisfactory from the comedy angle. The sole musical element consists of casting our hero, played by Fred McMurray, as a concertina-player, a choice of instrument guaranteed to provide humour by its plebeian contrast to royalty. McMurray also sings a spoof ode to his concertina at the obligatory onboard musical evening that gathers all the murder suspects together -- save one! -- to stage the climax to the mystery plot. Unfortunately the solution to the latter turns out to be extremely lame, the plot line having been again almost totally subjugated to the need for laughs, and chiefly providing an excuse for the introduction of four stereotyped comedy detectives -- the dapper Frenchman, the pompous Prussian, the pipe-smoking Englishman and the devious Russian -- and an opportunity to implicate Carole Lombard's Swedish princess.

Lombard's haughty impression of the princess who just wants to be left alone is the main selling-point of the film, and the difficulties this role places in the way of romance with her cocky concertina artiste, 'King' Mantell, provide most of the rest of the comedy. Filmed through a gauzy lens, she has perhaps never been more beautiful, and the script handles her predicament with sympathy, but this one gimmick isn't quite enough in the end to carry off the rest of this mish-mash of a film.

Ultimately I felt that it strains at too many different goals and falls short of most of them: its worst actual defect is the hand-waving denouement to the detective plot, which is of a nature to embarrass Agatha Christie at her most contrived, but the climax to the romance also somehow struck me as arbitrary and unsatisfactory, given how hard her character has defended her increasingly impossible situation throughout the rest of the film. Again, I get the feeling that the plot demands of the comic and romantic set-up respectively are pulling in conflicting directions rather than forming a happy blend.

Not a long-lost classic, but a curiosity, perhaps; worth seeing for Lombard's title performance, but ultimately less than a harmonious whole.