Summary
Picture a champagne-cork universe where imperial twilight meets jazz-age insouciance: pampered Manhattanite Eddie Ramson—equal parts Bertie Wooster and Gatsby’s ghost—gets strong-armed by his steel-magnate patriarch onto a freighter bound for frost-bitten Vladivostok, 1921. Aboard the creaking vessel, Eddie’s silk cravats flutter against Captain Carleton’s iron regulations like moth wings against a searchlight. Yet beneath the port’s sooty snowdrifts he discovers Sophie Semenoff, a school-marm whose Slavic cheekbones could slice fog and whose grammar lessons carry subversive whispers of Pushkin and populist revolt. Their courtship is a slapstick ballet: Eddie hijacks a troika of White Army deserters to crash a village pageant; Sophie counters with a clandestine lecture on women’s suffrage delivered inside a potato cellar lit by kerosene lamps. When Bolshevik patrols close in, Eddie’s idea of counter-intelligence is disguising himself as a bearded cantor and smuggling Sophie out in a crate marked “American phonographs.” The nuptials occur inside a frost-laced guardhouse—Cossack rifles for altar candles—followed by Eddie’s brief incarceration for “ideological hooliganism.” Back in New York, the Ramson matriarch—part Edith Wharton, part predatory swan—recoils at Sophie’s plebeian vowels until agents of the new Soviet order abduct the bride from a Fifth Avenue boutique. Eddie commandeers a biplane named Dusky Daisy, crash-lands on Long Island, and storms a derelict Gilded Age mansion turned spy nest. In the chandeliered showdown Sophie unmasks herself as Princess Sofia Sergeyevna, last scion of a vaporized dynasty, producing an emerald-encrusted Fabergé pencil once owned by Alexander II. The mother-in-law’s sneer melts into obsequious curtsies; the camera irises out on Eddie teaching his aristocratic wife the Charleston while the ghosts of two empires fox-trot into the credits.
Synopsis
At the behest of his father, fun-loving Eddie Ramson joins an expedition to Vladivostok, Russia, under the command of Captain Carleton. Unable to take his duties seriously, Eddie runs afoul of his commanding officer, but also wins the heart of peasant schoolteacher Sophie Semenoff. A series of merry chases result in Eddie's marriage to Sophie, followed by a brief sentence in the guard house. Eddie returns to the U.S. with his new bride, who is met with disapproval by her snobbish mother-in-law. Sophie is then kidnapped by Soviet agents, but Eddie soon comes to the rescue. Afterward, Sophie reveals that she is a member of the deposed Russian aristocracy, and Mrs. Ramson happily accepts her into the family.
