Thirty Day Princess

Getting through the backlog of movies on my DVR, I recently sat down to watch Thirty Day Princess, which TCM ran back in August as part of Sylvia Sidney's day in Summer Under the Stars.

Sidney doesn't quite show up at first. Instead, the action starts at the spa baths in the capital city of the Central European kingdom of Taronia. American banker Richard Gresham (Edward Arnold) is on vacation there, and just happens to be in a bath next to the regining monarch, Anatol XII (Henry Stephenson). Anatol strikes up a conversation with Gresham, as His Highness has admiration for a country like America where even the peasants have electricity and running hot water. Taronians are a good people, but the country is underdeveloped.

Ah, but Gresham is a banker! He could figure out a way to fund a bond issue that would help Taronia be able to develop. But there's one catch. Americans don't know anything about Taronia, and would need a public relations campaign to be persuaded to purchase the bonds. Anatol can't do a state visit to America, because there's always the possibility that somebody will start a coup and Anatol won't be able to get back to Taronia.

But Anatol has a daughter, Crown Princess Catterina (Sylvia Sidney), who would be perfect for going to America for that PR tour. The Americans would love a charming princess who has just enough difficulty with English to be lovable. She's up for it, especially since it will get her away from obnoxious fiancé Nicholaus, to whom she's only engaged for political reasons.

So Catterina and some of the King's advisers take the ship to America and, on arrival, Catterina gives a speech. But she collapses at the end of the speech and is taken to the hotel feeling slightly ill. It turns out that she has the mumps, requiring her to quarantine for 30 days, and threatening to put the kibosh on the grand tour.

The bond issue failing would please Porter Madison III (Cary Grant) to no end. He's a newspaper publisher, and his paper prints the sort of populist stuff that generates dislike of bankers like Gresham, who Madison would argue is responsible for that little economic depression that's going on.

Gresham comes up with a backup plan. There are 8 million people in New York; surely, one of them has to look enough like Catterina that they can substitute her with a little training and pass her off as the Princess until the bond issue can be subscribed. It's the sort of daft plot you only see in the movies, of course, but don't think too hard.

Nancy Lane is a struggling actress who can't even pay the rent. She goes to an Automat, where she's accosted by two guys who she thinks are the police wanting her for trying to get a turkey leg without paying for it. Instead, they're actually representatives of Gresham, hired to find a lookalike for Catterina. Nancy, unsurprisingly, looks exactly like Catterina, because Nancy is also played by Sylvia Sidney. (There's one scene of Nancy and Catterina together toward the end.) Nancy could use the money, and who wouldn't like to try out being royalty for a month, so she takes the job.

You can probably guess what happens next, which is that Nancy-as-princess meets Madison, and the two fall in love, while Madison's associates at the paper thinks there might be something fishy and try to prove it. Nicholaus eventually shows up in America to try to prove that the woman Gresham has been trotting out in public isn't actually Catterina. But this being a light comedy, you can suspect that the plot isn't really going to work and people are going to live happily ever after.

Thirty Day Princess is a nice little programmer. Sidney was a fairly big star for Paramount at the time, while Cary Grant was still on the rise, not yet getting the roles that would really make him a big star. They make an appealing enough couple. The plot is nothing earth-shattering, but it's got the sort of predictability that would probably have made Depression-era audiences happy. It all works pleasantly enough, entertaining for the roughly 75 minutes that it runs.

You could do far worse than to watch a movie like Thirty Day Princess. It got a DVD release courtesy of Universal's MOD scheme, and TCM also shows it as being available on a couple of Cary Grant box sets.