Princess O’Rourke isn’t a terrible film.
It’s a popcorn film, one which goes down pleasant enough but doesn’t leave any lasting impression.
Olivia de Havilland plays Maria, a bored princess who longs for freedom from the strictures of royal life. Her uncle wants her to settle down, marry, and get on with the business of producing the next heir, but Maria is looking for a little excitement in her life and a man who will stir her heart.
She flies to California under an assumed name and takes too many sleeping pills to calm her nerves. When the flight is called off due to bad weather, pilot Eddie O’Rourke (Robert Cummings) cannot wake her. An amusing series of scenes follow in which poor Eddie tries to wake a drugged Maria. De Havilland rolls around limp and disoriented, playing out a gag that sister Joan Fontaine would repeat five years later in You Gotta Stay Happy (1948), when her character also takes too many sleeping pills and poor Jimmy Stewart has to deal with her.
As she’s using an assumed name with no contact information, Eddie can’t locate anyone to pick Maria up and ends up taking her back to his apartment. Realizing she has a chance to experience life as a normal person, the princess pretends to be a poor maid and spends a few days with Eddie.
She never planned on falling in love with him.
The storyline is well-covered ground, and would be perfected in 1953’s Roman Holiday.
It’s not a terrible film.
But it’s exactly the kind of role Olivia de Havilland was desperate to escape.
In May 1943, just after the filming of Princess O’Rourke, de Havilland’s contract with Warner Brothers was up. However, Warner Brothers added up the time of her many suspensions and declared she owed them six more months of work. This was standard industry practice at the time—when an actor refused a role, they would be put on suspension for the length of the filming. A seven-year contract meant seven years of work, and time on suspension didn’t count.
Actors resented the clause, as they nearly always went on suspension to avoid roles that would damage their career. Bette Davis lost a suit in 1937 to void her contract, and while James Cagney had used frequent walk-outs to renegotiate his contract on more favorable terms, no one had successfully overturned the rule around suspension time.
Jack Warner figured no one ever would. He’d ruin anyone who dared to try.
De Havilland consulted with lawyer Martin Gang, who felt that they could win by citing a little-known California law that prevents an employer from enforcing a contract that lasted longer than seven years. (An old law once written to protect slaves and indentured servants.)
She didn’t take Gang’s word for it. She studied the law herself, again and again.
“Everyone in Hollywood knew that I would lose but I knew that I would win,” she said years later. “I had read the law.”
Losing the case would likely destroy her career. Even a win was no guarantee that another studio would be willing to work with such a troublemaker.
She got the same advice again and again—bite the bullet, do any movie Warners wanted her to do, and in twenty-five weeks she’d have her freedom. Forget about some crazy lawsuit.
Instead, on August 23, 1943, Olivia de Havilland (who had clocked in at five-foot-three and all of 100 pounds during the filming of 1939’s Dodge City) sued Warner Brothers and took on the whole studio system.
She had no illusions about the hornet’s nest she’d kicked, so she’d been squirreling money away. “Let’s go ahead with it,” she’d told Gang. “And we’re not going to get discouraged along the way. We will go to the Supreme Court.”
Jack Warner and his lawyers tried, unsuccessfully, to make her out to be a spoiled, rich actress in court. Lawyers hammered her, but she stayed cool under pressure while giving her testimony.
She won in Superior Court, and though Warner Brothers appealed again and again, in December 1944 she won in Appellate Court and Warner Brothers was out of options.
From now on, no studio could impose a contract longer than seven calendar years on an actor, regardless of the number or duration of suspensions.
She’d won.
Retaliation was swift and severe.
Jack Warner personally reached out to nearly eight studios, big and small, asking them to blacklist de Havilland.
She had her freedom, but no studio would hire her. She couldn’t even do most radio shows. And still she bided her time, entertaining the troops overseas, visiting military hospitals, reading, waiting.
In the end, those twenty-five weeks cost her three years off the screen and $13,000 (over $200,000 in today’s dollars) of her own money. The de Havilland Decision, as it came to be known, cracked open the studio system, and benefitted her successors more than it ever did de Havilland herself.
But she’d made her point.
“She licked me,” Jack Warner admitted in his biography.
And in 1946, Paramount Pictures came calling, the first studio willing to defy the blacklist Jack Warner hoped would last forever, and offered de Havilland a two picture deal.
She’d earned the right to call her own shots.
But the public was fickle, and she’d been out of their sight for three years, an eternity in Hollywood. She was thirty, a precarious age for an actress known primarily as a glamour girl. If her career sputtered out now, Jack Warner would have the last laugh.
Everything was riding on her next role.
Sources
- Amburn, Ellis. Olivia de Havilland and the Golden Age of Hollywood
- Matzen, Robert. Errol & Olivia: Ego & Obsession in Golden Era Hollywood.
- Warner, Jack. My First Hundred Years in Hollywood: An Autobiography
- Current Day Inflation # for $13,000: https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1800?amount=1
Want more? Click here for an index of all posts in the series, as well as source notes and suggested readings.
An a nice picture of an open cage to drill down on the metaphor; like Connery in the 70’s, she seems to have had no fear of fighting the studios. I guess it’s to do with sheer strength of will and personality, but she remained a fighter to the end, as Ryan Murphy found out. This looks pretty hard to find, and without too much reason to find it, I’ll probably skip this one, but the story behind it is certainly interesting….
Yes I love the story of her lawsuit over Feud when she was 100+. That takes some serious moxie. She’s got a lot of good films; I’d say you’re right to take a pass on this one. It is really the perfect example of WB giving her nothing substantial to do.
Also, getting off track at bit, but I thought Catherine Zeta Jones was miscast as Olivia in Feud and they did make her too catty. I thought Sarandon and Lang did a great job of portraying Davis and Crawford.
On the subject of modern actors taking on classic actor portrayals: Trumbo is pure gold to me. Best bioflick, ever. Anyway, I’ve always dug David James Elliot. I thought he was a pretty solid — and not cheesy, which it could have easily been — John Wayne. Portraying an icon ain’t easy, but he did good.
And yes: Jones took Olivia a bit too far. You know the old “don’t go full ‘tard” line from Tropic Thunder. She needed a good rein-pull on the catty.
You’d think, in these digital days, with all of these retro shingles, nothing would be “hard to find” in the marketplace. It saddens me that some of these film will be lost. They’ll still be out there, but no one will go looking for them. Outside of the three of us, really, who’s looking for films solely for an Olivia fix?