Princess O'Rourke

Seeing Princess O'Rourke last night on TCM, it was interesting to learn that interiors at the White House were shot at the real location. And while the current president was occupied by something called World War II, he found time to have his well known Scot's terrier Fala make a guest appearance.

That is the real Fala you see playing message courier between Princess Olivia DeHavilland and the pilot from Brooklyn, Robert Cummings. She's a princess from some unnamed European country that is currently occupied by some jackbooted uninvited guests. Most of the royalty in exile settled in the United Kingdom during war time, but some actually did make it here. In fact Olivia's father the king is in London as the story goes.

And this is a Cinderella story in reverse with the boy from Brooklyn, meeting, wooing and winning a princess. Cummings is an airline pilot scheduled to go in the Army Air Corps who meets princess DeHavilland on a flight that gets canceled back to New York. A slight overdose of sleeping pills leaves her in his unwanted hands. The unwanted part changes soon enough as it does in all films of this type.

The ironic thing is while some royalty did make it back to their countries, a lot were dispossessed permanently by those other totalitarian occupiers from the East after World War II. They didn't exactly live in the diminished circumstances that Olivia was heading for. Some of Charles Coburn's concerns as her uncle are quite real.

Princess O'Rourke is a charming comedy though dated by its topical wartime references. Look also for nice performances by Jack Carson as Cummings's co-pilot and Jane Wyman as Carson's girl friend.