by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
One Hundred Men and a Girl — despite that ridiculous title, which makes it sound like an unusually highly-budgeted porn film (Charles joked that the hundred men sounded fine, but they ruined it by dragging in the girl) — is another matter entirely, a near-masterpiece given the rather silly conventions of its genre. Made in 1937 — and only Durbin’s second feature film (her short with Judy Garland, Every Sunday, and Three Smart Girls were its predecessors) — it cast Durbin as the daughter of a widowed symphony trombone player (Adolphe Menjou) who gets backing from the rather ditzy wife (Alice Brady) of a major radio sponsor (Eugene Pallette) to organize a symphony orchestra of her father and his 99 out-of-work musician friends and get Leopold Stokowski (playing himself, and second-billed to Durbin) to conduct it. The plot (by Ernst Lubitsch’s former collaborator, Hans Kraly — a German immigrant, like producer Joe Pasternak and director Henry Koster) is little more than a series of situations in which Durbin overcomes the impossible odds against her and puts all the elements (her father, his musician friends, the sponsors, Stokowski and herself as vocal soloist with the “Orchestra of Unemployed Musicians”) together. But Durbin plays this ridiculous role with absolute conviction, projecting an indomitable spirit and seeming at times so much like Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz two years later that it’s likely Garland and Victor Fleming studied this movie and attempted to duplicate Durbin’s and Koster’s approach to this type of character. And her singing is gorgeous (better than it was later, when her voice blossomed but also became more studied), particularly in the “Alleluia” section of Mozart’s motet “Exsultate, Jubilate” (which she sings during a Stokowski rehearsal that she’s managed to crash, while he’s rehearsing the orchestral part of the score) — failing only towards the end, when she attempts the “Libiamo!” drinking song from Verdi’s La Traviata (with an embarrassing gap where the chorus is supposed to come in — I joked that that would have been the sequel: she rounds up 100 out-of-work choir singers to … ), which she sings decently enough but whose meaning is simply too mature for her. The recorded sound is beautiful for the period (as it usually was in Stokowski’s projects; he insisted on recording the music in Philadelphia, and Durbin added her vocals in Hollywood in what may have been the first example of multi-track recording in a film musical) and while the pieces aren’t played note-complete, there’s enough of each one that one doesn’t have the jarring snippet-like effect one usually gets in a film of this period involving classical music. — 7/19/96
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I walked over to Charles’ place
and ran him the movie One Hundred Men and a Girl and the Bravo! documentary on jazz trumpeters that I
put immediately afterwards on the same tape. Charles enjoyed both, noting (as I
had in my journal notes right after I saw it for the first time) that A
Hundred Men and a Girl is actually quite
good if you can get beyond its basic silliness (and this time, in the company
of someone as politically Left as Charles, I noticed an interesting strain of
bitterness in its portrayal of the rich, perhaps conditioned by a certain
amount of “status anxiety” within the studio that made this film, Universal,
which — like Durbin’s character in the movie — led a scrappy, hand-to-mouth
existence in competition with the bloated “majors” like MGM and Paramount; as
in Universal’s screwball comedy of the previous year, My Man Godfrey, there’s a certain knife-edge in the class content of
this movie, a real bitterness at the way the rich people play with each other
and drop three- and four-figure sums at the drop of a hat, while the poor
people struggle for a hand-to-mouth existence). — 9/9/96
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I watched the Turner Classic Movies showing of
the 1937 Universal film One Hundred Men and a Girl, Deanna Durbin’s second feature and a movie that I
thought when I first saw it bore a striking resemblance to The Wizard
of Oz, even though Wizard was made two years later. Though One Hundred Men and a Girl is a naturalistic movie (Durbin plays the daughter
of out-of-work trombonist Adolphe Menjou; taking all too seriously the
off-handed jokes of a rich couple that they’d be willing to back the project
financially, she gets her father to organize an orchestra of out-of-work
musicians and gets it on a nationwide radio show by persuading Leopold
Stokowski — playing himself[1]
— to conduct), the similarities to Wizard are obvious both plot-wise (in both films a 16-year-old actress plays
a rambunctious child who seeks out an avuncular white-haired authority figure
to make the dreams of herself and her friends come true, and — against all the
odds — finds him and succeeds) and stylistically. Durbin’s acting is
alternately energetic and tremulous, indomitable in some sequences and
heartbroken at others, and she manages to create a larger-than-life character
even though she’s not either childishly cute (like Shirley Temple) or adult
movie-star glamorous — and Judy Garland’s performance in Wizard is so Durbinesque I’m convinced she must have
screened this film and picked up on Durbin’s style, just as Wizard’s director, Victor Fleming, must have studied Henry
Koster’s work on One Hundred Men and a Girl to pick up pointers on how to make a fairy tale like
this believable to a movie audience. As incredibly popular as she was (at least
in the early years of her career; Durbin never quite recovered from producer
Joe Pasternak’s decision to leave Universal for MGM after It Started
with Eve in 1941), Durbin is almost totally
neglected today — the fact that she quit the movie business altogether at 27
and had a long and happy life in retirement (it still seems to me that the only child stars that went on
to relatively sane adulthoods were the ones like Durbin and Temple who got out
of the business altogether) and didn’t live the kind of self-destructive roller-coaster life that made Judy
Garland’s career a real-life soap opera until she died tragically young at 47
in 1969 seems to have ensured that Durbin never became a legend — yet Universal
deserves credit for casting her quite creatively, giving her roles in noir films like Christmas Holiday and light thrillers like Lady on a Train in the mid-1940’s while MGM was shoving Garland into
one overstuffed period musical (Meet Me in St. Louis, The Harvey
Girls, The Pirate, Easter Parade) after
another.
Despite the limitations of its genre, One Hundred Men and
a Girl (when I first showed it to Charles
he thought it sounded like a straight porn film!) manages to be a quite
remarkable movie, engaging not only in the sheer power of Durbin’s performance
(and a quite good supporting cast, headed by Menjou — who manages expertly to
portray the defeated aspects of his character even though, when we actually see
him supposedly playing the trombone in character, he handles it so ineptly he
looks like he’s playing baseball with it — and Alice Brady as the ditzy society
woman, wife of tire manufacturer Eugene Pallette; there are also nice bits by
Billy Gilbert as the owner of the garage where the unemployed musicians
rehearse, and Frank Jenks as a singing cabdriver) but also in a dramatic
class-consciousness in the Bruce Manning-Charles Kenyon-James Mulhauser script
that (like the class-consciousness of the 1934 Imitation of Life) one expects from a Warner Bros. film far more than
something from Universal; much of the heartbreak of this film comes from the
off-handedness of the rich people in it, whose jokes have such cruel effects on
the poor people who hear their chance remarks as serious offers of help and
count on them to survive. There are plenty of felicitous touches, including the
feather in Durbin’s hat that becomes part and parcel of her characterization
and gives her away when she’s trying to sneak around in the theatre where
Stokowski is rehearsing (“played” by the set Universal used whenever they
needed a big theatre — the one they built for the 1925 Phantom of the
Opera that is apparently still standing on
the Universal lot today, making it the oldest movie set in continuous use).
As
usual in his films, Stokowski insisted on recording the music with the
Philadelphia Orchestra in Philadelphia (at the Academy of Music, where most of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s
RCA recordings under both Stokowski and Ormandy were made) and on using a
multi-channel sound system (contemporary accounts differ on whether he used 12,
14 or 28 microphones but this was still an unusually high number in an era in
which most symphonic recordings were made with two, three or at most four), so
the on-screen musicians from Hollywood were merely miming to pre-recordings of
a different orchestra altogether (though it’s possible that the scenes in which
the Orchestra of Unemployed Musicians is playing without Stokowski conducting may have been recorded in
Hollywood and conducted by Universal’s house music director, Charles Previn —
André’s father). As for Durbin’s singing — which in itself probably helped to
date her, since she had the bad luck to emerge precisely when the operetta
style she was best at was fading in popularity and swing was replacing it —
it’s quite good in operetta material, less so in all-out opera (though in One
Hundred Men and a Girl her coloratura on
the “Alleluia” from Mozart’s Exsultate, Jubilate — an oddly recherché piece of classical music to hear in a popular film in
1937 — is quite capable[2])
and O.K. but nothing special in popular song (Frank Loesser wrote “Spring Will
Be a Little Late This Year” for her to sing in Christmas Holiday and she manages it nicely enough but Sarah Vaughan,
for whom this kind of material came naturally, blows her away on the song). The
British Hallmark CD The Golden Voice of Deanna Durbin (cribbed from her movie soundtracks, not her Decca
studio records) contains a ghastly English-language version of “Un bel dì”
using the same dreadful translation Eva Turner sang on her record (in which Butterfly imagines seeing Pinkerton
“on the brow of a hillock” on his way back to her) which Durbin makes it
through capably but dully, though on pieces like the Bach-Gounod “Ave Maria,”
“Les Filles de Cadiz” (which she sings, blessedly, in French) and “The Last
Rose of Summer” the voice is quite lovely, the coloratura expert if not at the
spectacular level of Sutherland or Sills, the phrasing simple and eloquent.
Durbin’s films are due for a major rediscovery! — 10/31/06
