The girl of course being Deanna Durbin. She was fifteen at the time appearing
in only her second film after Three Smart Girls from the year before. She
was already a star and would soon be largely responsible for saving Universal
with a series of hit films. How times have changed that films like this could
have been so popular. Not just that they were musicals but so wholesome and
innocent. Deanna had been at MGM and did a short alongside Judy Garland,
but the studio felt there wasn't room for two young female singing stars
so they let Deanna go to Universal. Judy is of course an icon today while
Deanna has fallen into obscurity. Partly, I think because of her operatic
singing style compared to Garland's pop and jazz renderings - not to mention
Somewhere Over the Rainbow. And partly that Durbin led a fairly dull life
with no scandals and retired when she tired of the business at 27 years old
never to return. Durbin's singing style was popular at the time as
was Jeanette MacDonald's similar style but now they sound very quaint and
old-fashioned. But Deanna has a powerful voice with tremendous range and
can fire off rockets to the moon when she goes for those high notes and holds
them. Again at sixteen.
This is a standard Depression comedy-drama-musical. It is as sentimental
as a visit to your sick grandmother's. Which I should mention I am a sucker
for. Especially the old ones - a lost art to some degree because we find
it so easy now to laugh at cinematic sentiment and I think most directors
are afraid to go there unless it is a Hallmark Special. She is a confectionary
joy - button cute with more energy than should be legal. And in a number
of her films she sees it as her duty to make things right. In Three Smart
Girls it was to bring her parents back together through wile and here she
sees it as her duty to save her father from poverty and through luck and
nerve she does just that. She and Nancy Drew have a lot in common - they
see a problem or a mystery and they solve it. Good role models for girls
back then.
Her father (Adolphe Menjou) is an out of work trombone player who tries to
get the great conductor Leopold Stokowski to give him work. He fails but
finds a purse outside with enough money to pay the rent for the month. When
Patricia (Deanna) hears about this, she returns the purse and what is left
of the money to a ditzy society matron (Alice Brady) who upon hearing Pat's
story says she will sponsor an orchestra of the unemployed - and then immediately
forgets it. But Pat takes her seriously and organizes an orchestra of the
unemployed only for her dream to be dashed when the sponsor goes to Europe
and her frog-throated husband (Eugene Pallette) has no idea what she is talking
about. Get me a famous conductor and I will let you play on my radio but
you are nobodies. Bing goes her brain. Thus Stokowski enters the picture
again.
Amusing at times, sweet at others, old fashioned as custard pie with lots
of music from Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra and Durbin belts out
four songs - It's Raining Sunbeams, A Heart That's Free, Mozart's Hallelujah
and The Drinking Song from La Traviata that we have all heard many times.
Also appearing are Mischa Auer, Frank Jenks, Billy Gilbert and about 98 other
musicians. Directed by Henry Koster, who was to direct many of her films.
