Three Smart Girls was Deanna Durbin’s first movie. It has a good backstory. Its director, Henry Koster, had recently arrived in Hollywood after fleeing Europe. He had begun a career writing and directing in Germany, then in exile in France, and again in Hungary, where he made films in German and Hungarian for the European division of Universal. In Hollywood, Koster was promised backing for only one film, with no guarantees for further work. His English was poor, and Hollywood was filling up with refugee movie people. He was handed the screenplay for Three Smart Girls, a shoestring B-budget, and the use of some Universal contract players. He chanced to hear Deanna Durbin on the Universal lot — she was 14. She had been signed by MGM on the basis of a screen test that has become one of the legends in Hollywood history: the short film “Every Sunday” in which she and Judy Garland were tested together.
MGM dropped her, and Universal offered her a contract. As Koster tells it, Durbin did not want to be an actress at all. She wanted to be an opera singer. She was reluctant to take the role and stay in Hollywood and did not believe she had acting talent. Koster coached her during shooting, and went on to direct her in five more films. On the strength of that partnership, Durbin became one of the greatest international film stars of the ’30s and ’40s, saving Universal from bankruptcy. It’s said when she retired at 29 and moved to France, she was the highest paid female star in Hollywood.
In Three Smart Girls not only does Durbin not get top billing, she’s the last name in the credits scroll.
There’s nothing snappy, cynical, or slick about Three Smart Girls. It’s basically a 19th century family comedy set in modern times: three daughters striving hard to prevent their estranged Father (Charles Winninger) from divorcing their beloved, dignified Mother (Nella Walker) for an elegant gold digger (Binnie Barnes) and her scheming mother (Alice Brady). It’s genuinely sweet without being sentimental, and that’s largely due to Durbin’s screen presence. Her role as the youngest but most persistently inventive of the daughters sets up the basic comic structure: the corrupt adult scheming women, whose repertoire is all too standard and obvious, meet their match in the authentic young woman who is a better schemer because she schemes for family love — and because she’s so young, she’s constantly underestimated. It’s not just a matter of Durbin’s role and acting; her soon to be world famous soprano, warmer even than that of the reigning movie operetta queen, Jeanette MacDonald, makes one feel that the screen expands when she sings.
That’s not just a matter of her voice, either. Koster had an old-school sensibility. You don’t see edgy Berlin techniques. But he had a fine understanding of how to use Hollywood techniques. In one scene, Binnie Barnes’s gold digger is showing off by singing a song, the now classic “Someone to Care for Me,” which she sings as if doing an open mic in a Berlin cabaret. (It’s Durbin’s rendition that made it famous, not Barnes’s.) It’s Deanna’s character Penny’s bedtime, so she goes upstairs — and proceeds to make an unholy racket that interrupts the song, and elicits her father’s disciplinary intervention. It has been years since he’s seen his daughters, and he rediscovers how lovable they are, especially Penny. Knowing they are now reconciled, Peggy sings the same song to her father. Koster backs up the musical difference between the two renditions with appropriately striking shot contrasts.
This effect of expanding the visual field through the music has to be experienced. The cinematographer, Joseph Valentine, went on to be Durbin’s go-to cameraman, even in films not directed by Koster. He was also one of Hitchcock’s favorites in the ’40s.