A Compassionate Deception Never Goes Well...

In looking back over the many films I have selected for these screenings over the last nine(!) years, it occurs to me that I have yet to show anything featuring an actress/singer who, in her day, was one of the most popular and beloved performers in the world.

At the peak of her fame she was the most highly-paid actress in Hollywood. Millions of adoring fans around the world fell in love with her screen persona as well as her monumental singing voice. She had made her first film appearance in the mid 1930s when she was still a young teenager, but that phenomenal singing voice belied her youth, and her legions of adoring fans worldwide got to watch her grow up and enter adulthood over the course of the films she made in the late 30s and early 1940s. 

The prospect of her first ever onscreen kiss made nationwide headlines and prompted a Gone With the Wind-style search to cast the lucky young man who would get to be at the other end of that kiss.

It's fair to say that she wasn't just a movie star; she was a legend; a movement. And an inspiration to an entire generation, who saw her as a symbol of the best parts of themselves.

And here she is, standing next to Judy Garland.


I am talking, of course, about Deanna Durbin.


At the height of her fame, Deanna Durbin was arguably one of the most beloved and recognisable celebrities in the world. Anne Frank kept photos of Durbin pinned to the wall of her... wall... while she and her family hid from the Nazis. 

Winston Churchill screened Deanna Durbin films in Whitehall whenever the war news was positive, and Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich cites her as a fundamental influence on his own musical development.

"She helped me in my discovery of myself. You have no idea of the smelly old movie houses I patronized to see Deanna Durbin. I tried to create the very best in my music, to try to recreate, to approach her purity."


Don't feel too guilty if you are only dimly aware of Deanna Durbin. Although she made 21 films between 1936 and 1948, she withdrew completely from her film career when she was only 28 years old. Between 1949 and her eventual death in 2013 (at the age of 91) she lived a completely private life, consenting to only one single interview (in 1983) and declining multiple appeals to resume her career. She was offered the lead roles (on stage) in My Fair Lady and Kiss Me, Kate among other things, but rejected everything, preferring to live her life as a private citizen, away from the public eye.

The only publicly released photo of Durbin in later years, taken by her husband in the early 1980s

Unlike her friend and colleague Judy Garland, Durbin was never an "adulation junkie" (or any other kind of junkie for that matter) and she stopped making movies when she realised she was no longer enjoying it. 

The film of hers that I have chosen to screen is one she made in 1941.


It Started With Eve features the great Charles Laughton as a larger-than-life, headline-grabbing millionaire who (at the beginning of the film) is on his deathbed. 


His dying request to his (slightly wayward) son is to meet the son's fiancé before it's too late. When the son is unable to contact his fiancé in time, he grabs a random hat-check girl out of the hotel lobby and presents her to his dying father as his bride-to-be, hoping that the harmless deception will ease his father's final moments.


Complications ensue.

By the time It Started With Eve was released in 1941, 20-year-old Deanna Durbin had already appeared in nine films and had won audiences over with her persona as a very resourceful and intelligent girl (later woman) who generally managed to achieve her goals by determination, optimism, general pluck and, it has to be said, a phenomenal singing voice. Her characters more often than not came from very humble backgrounds and had to struggle against every disadvantage, but they were never pessimistic or downbeat. For a generation of movie-goers, Deanna Durbin was a symbol of grace and positivity in the face of adversity.


The films she appeared in could never quite be classed as musicals per se (although she always winds up singing at some point in the plot). There are no big musical production numbers or spectacular dance sequences. Her films were... Deanna Durbin films. She always received top billing, no matter how famous the other performers might have been, and she was the box office draw. Whether she was sharing the screen with Gene Kelly, Charles Laughton or Leopold Stokowski, it wasn't any of them that brought audiences into the theatres; it was her. Deanna Durbin.


She was loved.

We will be screening It Started With Eve at 7.30 on Thursday, the 29th(!) of February at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

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