Carole Lombard co-starred with Fred MacMurray in four feature films. One I had not seen until recently is 1936’s The Princess Comes Across, an unusual and unsettled mix of whodunit and screwball comedy.
Lombard boards a cruise ship while surrounded by paparazzi, as she is going to Hollywood to work as a studio’s latest star there. It is no surprise when it is revealed her Swedish accent is only an affectation (and one that was very popular at that time, thanks to the success of Garbo). Helping her maintain this ruse is assistant Alison Skipworth, who arranges things like the arrival of massive flower that were supposedly sent by various people of great renown.
MacMurray is the leader of a popular jazz combo. His instrument is the concertina, which seems out of place for that particular musical genre. This instrument is described at one point as a “comes from goes to kind of thing”, which is probably kinder than any description I might have for it.
Both of our leads have secrets which are they want to keep safe, but a blackmailer on board (Porter Hall) is keen to exploit those. Also on board is an escaped convict, and the telegraph conveniently only provides the name of the man and not a description. I guess they’ll have to hope this fugitive goes around wearing a nametag.
Fortunately, also on board are five detectives of various nationalities (Sig Ruman, Lumsden Hare, Douglas Dumbrille, Mischa Auer and Tetsu Komai), giving this a tinge of a detective comedy like Clue or Murder by Death. Nothing involving the detectives here is anywhere near as funny as anything in either of those films. Also, the mysteries here aren’t particularly intriguing and the characters don’t have sufficiently distinctive personality traits to warrant the rather large number of them. Lastly, having Ruman in a comedy and not giving him any particularly funny material should be a crime in and of itself.
One of the most interesting actors in this is Hall. He’s one of those minor character actors with a huge number of screen credits. He normally plays mousy, henpecked men, so it was interesting to see him as such a conniving weasel, if only to explore yet another stereotype courtesy of the animal kingdom.
The Princess Comes Across is a comedy and whodunit, but isn’t very successful at either one. What it should have focused on is Lombard’s shtick as a faux-Garbo (Fauxbo?). I really felt there was a great deal of potential humor left unmined regarding this. Compare this to The Major and the Minor, which gave Ginger Rogers just one bit of dialogue along these lines, and her saying in a faux-Swedish, “I vant to be alone…” is remarkably funnier than anything here.