You still gotta stay happy

Back when Olivia de Havilland died, TCM replaced a day in Summer Under the Stars with a day of her movies, which gave me the chance to DVR a couple that I hadn't seen before. One of those, Princess O'Rourke, is on again tomorrow at 12:15 PM, so I sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

Olivia, as you can guess, does play the princess, but her name isn't O'Rourke. She's Princess Maria, who at the start of the movie is the princess of some unnamed central European country that's been overrun by the Nazis, the movie having been released in 1943. The royal family has been forced to flee, with Dad in exile in London and Princess Maria, together with a secretary and an uncle, Holman (Charles Coburn), holed up at a hotel in New York (I'm guessing they don't control the embassy in Washington).

Maria is bored in New York, and has a count she doesn't care for pursuing her because the royal family needs a suitable marriage. Holman decides that the best thing to do would be to send Maria out west, since the royal family has some friends in California who have a ranch. It would be a nice change of pace for Maria, as well as a way to get her out of the spotlight for her own safety should the need arise.

The only problem is that she's going to have to fly out to California, something that she's rather afraid of doing. Holman and the secretary come up with the brillian idea of giving her a sleeping pill before the flight, so that she'll sleep through the flight (a redeye with train-like sleepers) and wake up in California refreshed.

But it doesn't work out like that. Maria can't sleep, so first she asks the stewardess for a sleeping pill. She still can't sleep, so now it's the turn of co-pilot Dave Campbell (Jack Carson) to give her a pill. When that still doesn't seem to work, she asks the pilot, Eddie O'Rourke (aha! there's the O'Rourke, played by Robert Cummings), for a pill, and he gives her two.

The pills eventually do the trick, and perhaps Holman should have told her in the first place that it wasn't going to be instantaneous. But taking five of them really knocks Maria out, to the point that when the plane hits fog and has to turn back to New York, she doesn't realize the plane has landed, and can't wake up. And when she finally does, it's left her with a cloudy brain such that she can't remember where she's staying.

So O'Rourke puts her up at his place for the night, since Dave has a wife in Jean (Jane Wyman) and Eddie has the room, although Eddie asks Jean over to change Maria into something more appropriate for sleeping.

You can probably guess more or less what happens next. Maria likes this way of being incognito, so after she leaves Eddie's place, she escapes the hotel to go see him again. He wants to see her, anyway, not realizing she's a princess, and so begins a beautiful love relationship.

Well, that's how it begins, but it's going to take some twists and turns before it gets to the end. The big one, of course, is what's going to happen when Eddie finds out that Maria is in fact a princess. Perhaps thankfully for him, he comes from a long line of sons, leading Holman to believe that he's likely to produce a son for the royal family, which after all is the chief duty of a Prince Consort. But is Eddie going to want the sort of life that a Prince Consort has to live? And is Maria going to want that sort of life for Eddie?

For unsurprising reasons, Princess O'Rourke made me think of You Gotta Stay Happy, which I blogged about not too long ago. Both are about a pilot falling in love with a rich woman, and they have the sisters Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine. But of course there are a lot of differences, with the big one here being that Princess O'Rourke has the heavy hand of World War II hanging over it. Well, maybe not heavy in that it doesn't do anything to harm the movie; just that it gives the movie a completely different tone. It mostly works for Princess O'Rourke, and while it's certainly not the greatest movie in the careers of any of the main stars, there's nothing notably wrong with it.

If you want a change of pace from Olivia de Havilland, you could do a lot worse than to watch Princess O'Rourke.