Inspired by – rather than scrupulously adapted from – Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel The Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight (1905), The Runaway Princess provides a textbook compendium of Ruritanian themes and characters in comedic mode. In the book, Von Arnim sketchily describes the Grand Duchy of Lothen-Kunitz as lying “in the south of Europe”: “that smiling region of fruitful plains, forest-clothed hills, and broad rivers. It is one of the first places Spring stops at on her way up from Italy; and Autumn, coming down from the north sunburnt, fruit-laden, and blest, goes slowly when she reaches it, lingering there with her serenity and ripeness, her calm skies and her windless days long after the Saxons and Prussians have lit their stoves and got out their furs.”
A short-lived stage version, likely far closer to the original, was performed in New York in 1909, adapted by Edward Knoblauch (Knoblock; most famous as the playwright of Kismet) and retitled The Cottage in the Air. The vehicle was transformed by Anthony Asquith for his 1929 Anglo-German co-production, in which Wilhelmina Marie Alexandra Victoria, Princess of Lothen-Kunitz, Grand Duchess of Gerstein (etc., etc.), known to her friends as Priscilla, celebrates her 21st birthday surrounded by obsequious courtiers and served by flunkeys in elaborately braided and plumed uniforms. But Priscilla is bored with her life of luxurious indolence in a fairy-tale castle. When her parents inform her that a marriage has been arranged with the Crown Prince of Savonia, she decides to flee: “I wouldn’t marry a Prince for anybody.”
Ruritanian royals often live in the usually false hope of ordinariness (see Graham Cutts’ 1927 adaptation of Noël Coward’s The Queen Was in the Parlour). Hoping to travel incognito, a device also key to Three Weeks and Graustark, Priscilla dons a veil for her train journey across the Continent and feigns an infectious illness while newspapers report that the Princess is “indisposed”. Media fascination with royals remains a constant no matter which decade: in Géza von Bolváry’s The Vagabond Queen (1929), starring Betty Balfour, screened at the Giornate in 2002, a copy of The Balkan Times reports the disappearance of Princess Zonia, future “Queen of Bolonia and all the Bolonies”, “of the royal house of Perhapsburgs”, who, like Priscilla, escapes to London.
The Princess, accustomed to lavish wardrobe allowances, initially appears ill-equipped for the challenges of ordinary citizenship, being more acquainted with caviar and champagne than scrambled eggs. Her supply of ready cash exhausted, she announces an intention to find a job and applies for secretarial work: “foreign languages useful” reads the advertisement. (Fluency in multiple languages tends to go hand-in-hand with royalty, such as in the 1921 film adaptation of Channing Pollock’s 1909 play Such a Little Queen, in which Anne Victoria of Gzbfernigambia is adept at seven languages, including, presumably, Gzbfernigambian.) After an unsuccessful stint as a model and impeded by her lack of references, Priscilla takes a job delivering hatboxes – a further opportunity for levelling slapstick at the Princess’s expense.
The Runaway Princess, like Cutts’ The Queen Was in the Parlour, was an international co-production, largely shot in Berlin though work was reportedly also done at the new British Instructional studios at Welwyn in Hertfordshire, and Asquith’s use of popular London tourist attractions to establish location, such as the Tower of London, the Savoy, the lights of Piccadilly, etc., were approvingly noted by critics of the time. Though many secondary sources list Fritz Wendhausen as co-director, contemporary German-language periodicals credit him with künstlerische Oberleitung (artistic supervision). Wendhausen was no stranger to Ruritania, having directed Mady Christians in Eine Frau von Format (1928), which co-starred Diana Karenne, known for appearances in the 1916 and 1920 adaptations of Anthony Hope’s 1906 novel Sophy of Kravonia. Paul Cavanagh, seen here in an early role, returned to a mythical Balkan kingdom in the sound era when he appeared as Prince Keri of Zalgar in the 1933 adaptation of The Queen Was in the Parlour, retitled Tonight Is Ours.

Amy Sargeant