NICE GIRL?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 103, 13 June 1941, Page 16

NICE GIRL?

(Universal)

T has taken Deanna Durbin nine films and four years to develop from a smart girl into a nice girl with a question mark,

and the process has been as profitable to her producers as it has been pleasing to -her audiences. But although she celebrated the completion of her ninth picture by getting married, nine is apparently not her lucky number. Or at least it is not as lucky as Nos. 1 to 8 inclusive, though I don’t want it to sound as if I’m suggesting that the failure of Nice Girl? to come quite up to standard will make Deanna a back number. It’s just that the standard has been so high that any falling off is pretty noticeable. The fault is not really Deanna’s, but that of her producer, Joe Pasternak, who has made her the star of a rather aimless comedy of small-town life of the Four Daughters-Four Wives pattern which, from the point of view of plot and incident, is quite unworthy of the talent that has been lavished upon it. Besides Walter Brennan and Helen Broderick, this talent includes Robert Benchley, who appears as the slightly harassed but determinedly cheerful widowed father of three bouncing daughters, of whom Deanna is one. He also breeds rabbits, in order to write a treatise on the effects of diet. This is truly a small-town assignment for the bland and cosmopolitan Mr. Benchley who is always seen at his best in a perpetually semi-sozzled condition, whereas in this present role he could win a blue ribbon for temperance. Franchot Tone is almost as much a fish out of water as a dashing young scientist who descends on the Benchley household and causes romantic palpitations among the three man-mad daughters. Not content with being, as she says, litter-perfect in the habits of rabbits, Deanna seeks more worldly knowledge’ and by sundry devices, such as sticking a potato in the exhaust pipe of a car, manages at last to find herself satisfactorily compromised with the knowledgeable Mr. Tone. Hence the question mark in the title. Fortunately Mr. Tone is a@ nice man without question, and after the story has gone to extremes of absurdity to save her reputation, the young heroine ends up almost as innocent as she started. Indeed, although they let her put on some fairly heavy maké-up (including a pair of arched eye-brows) and a siren’s dress for the big seduction scene which ends in fiasco, Universal are still rather diffident even about letting their precious Deanna be

kissed seriously in public. However, now that she’s Mrs. Vaughn Paul one may expect them to relax a bit more. The story has its sparkling moments -dquite a number of them-but it lacks the wealth of musical and spectacular sequences which we have come to expect from a Durbin picture and which compensate for thinness of plot. She does sing, of course, several times-but it must be confessed that her highlyboosted rendering of "There’ll Always Be An England " is just an afterthought. Obviously some bright lad at Universal had the idea of tacking it on after the picture had been made in order to catch British Empire trade. Deanna sings the number quite well, I don’t deny, but personally, I object to any such commercialising of patriotic sentiment. .