Carole Lombard's fake Swedish accent is the best thing about The Princess Comes Across

If you love old-school screwball comedies where people talk way too fast and nobody seems to have a real job, yes, absolutely watch this tonight. Anyone who likes Carole Lombard looking incredibly glamorous while doing a terrible Greta Garbo impression will have a blast. 🚢

But if you hate goofy murder mysteries that suddenly get way too serious in the last twenty minutes, you might get a bit annoyed. It’s a weird little movie, but in a good way.

Carole’s Terrible, Wonderful Swedish Accent

So, Carole Lombard plays Wanda Nash, a girl from Brooklyn who wants to get a Hollywood screen test. Her genius plan? Put on a fancy veil, rent a expensive suite on a cruise ship, and call herself Princess Olga of Sweden.

Her fake accent is the absolute best part of the whole thing. She keeps dropping the "j" sounds and saying things like "yust" and "vonderful." You can tell she is having the time of her life pretending to be this icy royal.

Then she meets Fred MacMurray, who plays a bandleader named King Mantell. He plays the concertina, which is basically a tiny accordion. 🪗

He squeezes that thing like he’s trying to choke a small animal, but his face stays totally calm. It is highly hilarious to watch.

The ship itself looks massive, but it feels strangely empty. It kind of reminds me of the claustrophobic setups you get in older b-movies like Isle of Lost Men, where you know there are only about four sets total on the studio lot.

And Then Someone Gets Murdered

The first half is pure comedy, with Fred trying to figure out if she’s a real princess and Carole trying not to slip back into her Brooklyn slang. But then a creepy blackmailer gets murdered in her cabin, and the movie pivots hard into a detective story.

This is where the movie gets a bit messy. The transition is like hitting a speed bump at fifty miles an hour.

Suddenly, we have five different international detectives who just happen to be traveling on the same boat. It feels like the writers couldn't decide on one plot, so they just threw everything at the wall. 🕵️‍♂️

One of the detectives is played by Sig Ruman, who is always great at looking extremely stressed out. He does this thing with his mustache where it twitches whenever he gets mad at Fred MacMurray.

I love the scene where Carole tries to hide the body in her room. She’s wearing this massive fur coat that makes her look like a very fancy bear, shuffling around the cabin while people keep knocking on the door.

It has that frantic energy that makes these old 1930s films so easy to watch, even when the plot makes absolutely no sense. It’s much more energetic than something stiff like Devotion from a few years earlier.

Some Random Things I Noticed

• Alison Skipworth plays Carole’s "companion" and looks like she’s constantly wondering how she ended up in this script.
• The concertina music doesn't always match Fred’s hand movements, which is a fun game to watch if you get bored.
• Why does every cruise ship cabin in 1936 look larger than my actual apartment?
• The ending wraps up so fast you might accidantally blink and miss the entire explanation of who the killer was.

It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s 76 minutes of pure, silly fun. Lombard and MacMurray just had this natural chemistry that’s hard to fake.