The Princess Comes Across is fine example of how Hollywood in the classic period could ruin a good comedy by mixing genres, in this case a screwball comedy and a murder mystery. The Thin Man (1934) and its sequels were so popular that that particular pastiche seemed logical and a proven money-maker for the studios. I don’t admire The Thin Man as much as most viewers seem to — I think nostalgia may prevent folks from seeing the imbalance between the whodunit story and the glorious bantering performances by William Powell and Myrna Loy in the comic parts. In the subsequent films, the imbalance is even greater, and the comedy slides into schtick. Most of the imitator pastiches didn’t work, even when they were headed by stars, like William Powell and Jean Arthur in The Ex-Mrs. Bradford (1936). But the generic combo could also turn out even better than the model, like The Mad Miss Manton (1938). It’s mainly a matter of balancing the generic conventions, and I think the combinations of screwball — a female-dominant genre in almost every sense — with the hard masculine genres like the Western, the gangster film, and the crime procedural were particularly hard. (War films were so hard there are barely any examples of screwball war films — if you don’t count Preston Sturges’s The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero.) Maybe the goal was to create movies that would appeal equally to male and female movie goers, and if so, studios may have been willing to tolerate all sorts of disjunctions to get the tickets sold. The detective genre may have seemed the most promising one, because women could easily slip into the role of the amateur detective from more socially-approved roles like reporter (as in the popular Torchy Blane series starring Glenda Farrell and Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday) or a detective’s wife (like Joan Blondell in There’s Always a Woman [1938]). Almost by definition (in my book of definitions), the screwball requires the woman to prove her phallic control, and that means the masculine pretensions to professional mastery of law and order have to be punctured. The comedy has to win not only in the end, but throughout. If the crime plot gets too serious, too mysterious, it deprives comedy of one of its main values: the audience knows much more than the characters. For me, the comedy should always be paramount; I’m aesthetically allergic to comedy-whodunits in which the crime plot pushes the comic spirit off the screen. In the same way, if the attraction of the comic types becomes subservient to the fascinations of good vs. evil, comic freedom is severely constrained by easy morality.
The Princess Comes Across begins with the promise of a brilliant screwball. Princess Olga of Sweden (Carole Lombard) and her Lady in Waiting, Lady Gertrude (Alison Skipworth), embark on a luxury liner in Le Havre on their way to New York, whence they intend to travel to Hollywood for the Princess to make her first film. Lombard is at peak, parodying Garbo brilliantly with a fake Swedish accent and looking marvelous.
I’ve mentioned many times the tension I feel in comedies with glamorous female stars whose beauty places speed bumps in the comedy. In his study of classic Hollywood cinematography, Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir, Patrick Keating describes that tension in detail; the lighting and camera requirements for storytelling, with visual genre requirements for different scenes, was often at odds with the studios’ and stars’ demands that the stars look glamorous at all times, regardless of narrative mood. In comedy that was exacerbated. Comic heroines had to be humiliated at times; the comic setting needed to be crystal clear, since every detail and corner might be used for comic purposes; and comedy has a deep-seated contempt for deep character psychology. A story could become confusing if the heroine’s dazzle dictated how a scene is set (as with Lana Turner in Slightly Dangerous (1943), an attempt to make a noirish comedy).
It’s said that George Raft was the first choice to play the male lead (he was replaced by Fred MacMurray), but he bailed because he was sure that the studio choice for the camera, Ted Teztlaff, Lombard’s go-to cinematographer, would make him look bad by comparison. It was the right choice for a vain man. Lombard appears on the scene with maximum glamor. She’s also very funny — we know from the outset that the contrast is part of the joke. If glamor is going to work in a comedy, it has to take its knocks, too.
The film’s director, William K. Howard, tackles the glam/comedy friction head on, in one of my favorite moments from the era. Princess Olga and Lady Gertrude’s suite onboard was double-booked, and its other would-be occupant, King Mantell (MacMurray), a concertina-playing bandleader, refuses to move out. Until he sees her. Then he is star struck. King is a typical American down-to-earth Astairean hero in a sophisticated continental framework. He leaves the stateroom after all, and once he does Tetzlaff delivers a framed portrait that would have done Garbo proud.
The image is so striking I froze it for several minutes gazing at it. If ever there was a Mulveyan moment of presenting female beauty as a fetish, something to be looked at, this is it. But what happens next? In a blink-of-an-eye turnstile transformation so beloved by film comedy, it turns out that Princess Olga is actually Wanda Nash from Brooklyn.
The role clearly owes a lot to Ginger Rogers’s Comtesse Tanka Schwarenka in RKO’s Roberta from the previous year. Rogers’s Comtesse is revealed to be Lizzie Gatz from Indiana, pretending to be Polish aristocracy because “you’ve got to have a title to croon over here” in Paris. Rogers plays the “Countess of Indiana” in a broad vaudevillian imitation of Lyda Roberti, a star famous for her camp self-parodies, so the performance is doubly campy. Lombard’s variation raises the class of the camp. Another connection to Roberta is King’s role as a star concertina player. Astaire’s Huck Haines plays “feelthy” music and dances vulgar American dances stylishly. King Mantell plays an instrument that had until recently been associated in American culture with low-class European Jews and Latins, with polkas and tangos — an instrument so common no good has ever been heard to come of it. But being a Brooklyn girl, Wanda likes it; besides, King is a virtuoso. The film’s original working title was My Concertina, and King performs a show-stopper on the instrument a la Astaire or Sonja Henie.
In a classic Astaire move, King substitutes his name tag for the sender’s on a bouquet intended for Princess Olga (the original tag was already a fake, invented by Lady Gertrude for flowers she has had sent herself). And then Wanda hears that concertina.
Keating explains that orthodox studio lighting for comedies in the classic style required brightness and clarity, with no moody modeling, because the set needs to be seen by the audience in its entirety. That’s because the situation and its space need to be as prominent as the human actors. Individual psychological motivation is much less important than the comic possibilities of things happening outside the characters’ control — and those depend on objects, details, and spaces that have to appear inert until a gag, a slip-up, or a misappropriation makes them come alive. The Olga-to-Wanda transition gag depended on audience feelings about Hollywood beauty — it depends on the beauty fetish and it’s not repeatable once we know the truth. In another fine scene Howard uses a more conventional — and durable — comedic mise-en-scène, in which Lombard’s glamor has been significantly reduced, not only by the even lighting, but by our knowledge that Olga is Wanda from Brooklyn. King doesn’t know it yet, but he’s getting close.
So, what about the whodunit? I’m not going to dwell on it. The plot is very complicated with lots of moving parts. There are five detectives playing different national stereotypes onboard ship to find a murderer; there are several murders and blackmails; and many long non-comedic sequences that gradually take over the film. The photography, too, becomes increasingly stylized in the direction of noir that strike me as totally at odds with screwball.
Example: Olga discovers the first murdered body.
This shot (which is accompanied by dead air silence) does not go through the turnstile to comedy. It stays melodramatic. Another example:
King and his buddy-attendant Benton (William Frawley) are on verge of flushing out the villain — in a shipboard fog that is functionally as close to the opposite of the shots with which the film began as one can imagine. The noir has taken control. The comic spirit is lost in the fog. One third of The Princess Comes Across is wonderful as screwball comedy. The other two thirds squander it.
There’s some dispute about whether MacMurray, an accomplished musician, plays the virtuoso concertina parts himself. If he does, he learned virtuosity in record time on an instrument he hadn’t played before he was signed to the film. I’m sure he was dubbed. It’s not my favorite kind of music, but it’s impressive.