One Hundred Men and a Girl was Deanna Durbin’s second film, and like the first, Three Smart Girls, it was conceived and directed by Henry Koster. Its premise is sweet and daring. Durbin plays the daughter of a down-and-out symphony orchestra director, John Cardwell (Adolphe Menjou), whose one-hundred person orchestra is out of work. They all live in a gigantic run down boarding house, scrabbling hard to get a chance to play. Cardwell tries to get the superstar conductor Leopold Stokowski to give them an audition. It doesn’t work, until said daughter gets involved. Through her relentless ministrations, her cheerful purity of heart, and her beautiful singing, she eventually persuades Stokowski to give them a listen. Having snuck into a Stokowsi rehearsal, she bursts into the Alleluia from Mozart’s “Exultate, Jubilate,”which so impresses the maestro that he cancels his scheduled European tour and conducts Deanna’s adopted orchestra in a brilliant performance.
Like most of Durbin’s movies, it’s positive and simple, warm without cloying sentimentality. And far more than Three Smart Girls, it invites being seen as an auterist film by Koster. In his memoir, Menjou relates that Koster, a recent immigrant from Germany and Hungary, was horrified at how many classical musicians who had similarly fled Europe could not find work in the US. So he invented the fantasy of collecting them and auditioning them for a Stokowski-like superstar conductor. At first, the studio (Universal) scoffed at the idea. Who cares about classical music in America — or rather, in Hollywood? Koster’s plan to enlist Stokowski seemed especially absurd. But for some reason they relented, and the plan went forward. Stokowski was an international superstar by then, and was naturally attracted to the Hollywood ecosystem. He was romantically linked to Garbo. He made an appearance in the Paramount variety film The Big Broadcast of 1937, and was persuaded by Koster to play himself as a character in 100 Men.
It makes sense. Stokowski was the most visible and active purveyor of symphonic classical music for the petite bourgeois masses. He was also an egocentric showman who had manufactured his identity. He clearly grew to love Hollywood, where these traits were golden. A couple of years later he arranged and conducted the soundtrack of Fantasia for Disney. What’s more, folks in Hollywood did care about classical music…of a sort. Operetta movies were at least as dominant as jazz musicals. And Stokowski’s dramatic, hyper-legato orchestral style was the musical equivalent of epic cinema. Durbin surely played a role in all this. She was a reluctant movie star who really wanted to be an opera singer. In her films the line between popular ballads and operatic arias is a thin one. Koster is said to have run into problems especially in the scene when the jobless orchestra auditions for Stokowski. Koster wanted them to play imperfectly, to contrast them with the Stokowski-disciplined group in the film’s concert finale. But the orchestra — which was Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra (the players on-screen were actors) — wouldn’t go along, so the “audition” sounds as good as the concert.
It’s easy to imagine a film of that time telling the same story with a jazz band, a more innocent version of Orchestra Wives. But a 100-piece symphony orchestra? 100 Men and a Girl is a testament to Koster’s vision and persistence, and no doubt to Durbin’s new power at the studio. It’s the best example of what made Durbin’s Koster comedies distinctive, both as stories and as cinema — young American female problem-solving energy and European classical tradition.
