His Butler's Sister
Director: Frank Borzage
Year: 1943
Rating: 6.5
After Deanna Durbin finished It Started with Eve in 1941, she basically went
on strike. She wasn't happy with a lot of things about the star life in Hollywood
- the endless publicity, the lack of privacy - but in particular she was
not pleased with the roles that Universal was giving her. Even though they
were all hits and she was being paid very well. She felt that her roles were
all the same - good girl who fixes up things. Where was the glamour, the
seductress she complained. She was no longer a young girl. So she refused
to work for over a year. She was also going through a divorce. But when she
finally came back she plays a missionary in The Amazing Mrs. Holliday and
then once again plays Penny, her character from Three Smart Girls, in Hers
to Hold where she works in a defense factory during the war.
His Butler's Sister is once again a charming comedy with a dash of romance
but not so different than the roles she had played previously. Young, innocent,
full of good will and good cheer and able to sing. I was not too keen on
either of her two male co-stars which brought my rating down, but she shines
as usual. Universal also gives her two bang up singing performances (and
a few other smaller ones). In one she is taken to a Russian restaurant by
some male friends and her brother and the Russian friend announces that no
one can sing Russian songs correctly except of course Russians - at which
point she gets up as the band plays behind her and does a show stopper in
Russian. In the other she sings a selection from the opera Turandot to a
crowd of people as her coming out performance. They showed her enormous range
in singing.
Ann (Deanna) arrives fresh faced in New York City to live with her brother
who she thinks is enormously wealthy and to try to break into show business.
It turns out her brother played by Pat O'Brien is a butler to a wealthy man
- a famous composer played by Franchot Tone. O'Brien is much too old to play
her brother at 44 years old and Tone is fine - rather innocuous - but never
my idea of a romantic leading man. She gets hired as the maid and keeps trying
to sing for him but something always occurs to stop that from happening.
He has a high society girlfriend (Evelyn Ankers) of course - that seems to
be the trend in her films starting with Three Smart Girls, It Started with
Eve and here - and they are always thin, angular and with a mercenary glint
in their eye. You know they won't make it to the finish line. The All-American
girl next door will.
The best part of the film is the character actors that they surround Durbin
with - the housekeeper (Elsa Jannsen), the horny producer (Walter Catlett)
and the five butlers employed in the apartment building who take one look
at Durbin and are enchanted and follow her like puppy dogs. A great group
- Akim Tamiroff, Alan Mowbray, Frank Jenks, Sig Arno and Hans Conried. Whenever
they are on the screen it gets a lift in that screwball way I love. The director
of this is veteran Frank Borzage who had made some great films in his career
since the silent era - Seventh Heaven, Street Angel, Mortal Storm, Three
Comrades, History is Made at Night - but this one pretty much feels like
a studio assignment for him. Durbin was still not happy with the results
and in her next film is Christmas Holiday in which she is teamed up with
Gene Kelly! Sounds like a winner - except it is apparently (have not seen
it) a noir with neither her nor Kelly singing or dancing. It was one of her
few flops.
