For most film historians, the “continental style” of Hollywood comedies in the Interwar period was represented by Ernst Lubitsch and his circle at Paramount Studios, and later by the Jeanette Macdonald-Nelson Eddy operetta kitschfests at MGM. What this received knowledge ignores are the Deanna Durbin musicals at Universal Studios, produced and written by the circle around the Hungarian emigre producer Joe Pasternak and German emigre director Henry Koster. In fact, as Lubitsch experimented more and more with Americanizing European stories — experiments that produced his most original films, from Design for Living to Heaven Can Wait –, the Pasternak-Durbin-Koster axis doubled down on Euro-nostalgia. When Lubitsch jettisoned musicals altogether after The Merry Widow in 1935, and his diva Jeanette Macdonald became the queen of technicolor operettas adapted from the Broadway stage, the Universal Durbin films filled the gap with “continental” markers: Durbin’s operatic arias and general reverence for classical music, conservative family-oriented Cinderella stories, courtly conduct, closed social spaces, and the subtle black and white cinematography of Joseph Valentine. (Durbin made only one film in Technicolor, as late as 1944.) Even the famous “Durbin Formula” of an adolescent daughter-figure who fixes family- and generational problems owes more to pre-War Mitteleuropean sensibilities than to American ones. The classic Durbin heroine is impeccably charming and well-mannered, trained in the most refined art (classical music), and emotionally generous. And perhaps most important in these terms, she is, despite her youth, already prospectively nubile. The Durbin girl is intelligent, clever, cultured, and respectful enough to be viewed discreetly as a worthy wife for a responsible older man — a position still embraced by European societies before the War, but somewhat borderline in the U.S. in the era of the Hays Code. If Shirley Temple’s charisma came from the audience’s desire to protect her, Durbin’s came from the audience’s desire to embrace her. Temple represented young female vitality as cute, Durbin represented it as beautiful.
For what it’s worth, Durbin’s main male leads tended to be significantly older than she, and a few of her films play on the ambiguities of a teenager with a massive crush on a man old enough to be her father. In That Certain Age, her co-star Melvyn Douglas was 20 years her senior; in It’s A Date, Walter Pigeon was 23 years older than she; in Hers to Hold, Joseph Cotton was 16 years older. Franchot Tone, her love interest in His Butler’s Sister was also 16 years her senior. In a not-uncommon case of what Hollywood called the “doubling” of screen personality and real life, Durbin’s second husband, the German emigre Felix Jackson, who co-wrote several of her films and produced His Butler’s Sister, was 19 years her senior; her third and lasting husband, French director Charles Henri David, 15. I think it’s safe to say that Durbin was quite at home with the culture of young partners for older men. The logic of the romance between an older man and a younger woman is inextricably linked to the logic of patriarchal class relations. A comic-romantic alliance of a patrician with a ingenue from a lower class — an orphan, a maid, a peasant, a working-class girl — could represent a “proper” imaginary resolution to class friction.
As for Durbin’s beauty, it’s embodied in the second core element of the Durbin Formula: her voice. Many of her films are versions of a “a star is born,” but they are distinct within this quintessentially American genre in that her character is most often free of worldly ambition and rarely involved in backstage intrigues. (This changes somewhat as she comes of age.) Her singing bursts out spontaneously in the diegesis, without training, as if for the sheer love of musical expression. It’s a romantic stereotype: the natural singer whose angelic soprano amazes and heals because it expresses only love. Part of its wondrousness is that it is “naturally cultured” — even though it’s pure and springs spontaneously, it expresses and conforms to the highest standards of refined European art. (Durbin inspired several important technical advances in cinematic playback technologies. Her 100 Men and a Girl was the first film recorded in stereo, although most theaters weren’t equipped with stereo speakers yet. Jennifer Fleeger discusses some of the ways playback techniques shaped Durbin’s persona in her book Mismatched Women. Durbin’s voice has striking power to affect viewers somatically even now, even in the many of her films that have not been properly restored.) This combination of naturalness and culturedness is pretty standard for operatic drama. What makes the Durbin heroine distinctive is that she is emphatically “just a girl,” so she is inevitably underestimated by her supporting characters. Her gift comes as surprise even to the people closest to her. She rarely pushes it in front of others, unless it helps to solve the problems “Little Miss Fixit” (as her characters were often labeled) has to resolve, or simply because she “can’t help singing” (as one of her late films was titled). But it’s clear from the get-go as soon as her voice pours out, it is the voice of an adult woman housed in the body of an adolescent girl.
In her early films, her girlchild’s precocious gift is still contained by an old-school paternalistic family narrative. She sings for her father. But as she grew in age, things got more complicated. The studio executives were faced with the Shirley Temple problem: how could they keep making money from their child-star as she grew more and more “womanly?” With Durbin the problem was compounded — or smoothed, depending on how you look at it — in that she was growing into a glamorous woman on par with the most celebrated Hollywood divas. How would the studio handle an innocent adolescent girl who had a line of dolls fashioned after her when she became an alluring dish?
All this proved to be less of a problem for Durbin than it was in Temple’s case. Temple was relegated to supporting roles as a teenager, and her popularity declined as her innocence turned to experience. Durbin’s voice had always been mature. Even if her doll-inspiring gamine body was being left behind, her womanly voice was a constant. In a sense, she was growing into her voice. Another reason, the most relevant for my purposes, is that the Pasternak-produced old-school Europhile stories written for her were completely comfortable with quasi-romances between a precocious adolescent and father-figures. (For me, the transition happens in 1940’s Spring Parade, a remake of Frühjahrsparade, a pure Wienerwaltzer/Hapsburger pageant. In it, Durbin’s spunky Hungarian peasant girl finds a love ostensibly her own age at the Viennese court, a love blessed by the Great Father-Figure himself, the Emperor Franz Joseph. Reality check: her romantic leading man, Robert Cummings, was 11 years her senior.)
His Butler’s Sister is not often seen, but for me it’s the final quintessential Durbin Formula film. By this point, Durbin was the second highest paid actress in Hollywood and one of the highest earning women in the U.S. Her reputation and international popularity was immeasurable. Her fans spanned all ages. Though she was champing at the bit to play more serious roles, Universal was not ready to let go of their golden goose. She was just 21 years old, but she had made 12 films for Universal in 10 years, enough for her formula to be widely known and expected by audiences. While keeping her well within the genre-confines of singing comedies, her films often made gentle fun of her formula. His Butler’s Sister‘s central comic trope is a very funny structural joke on the theme of Deanna-the-underestimated-diva, whose voice comes as a surprise to everyone.
It’s worth describing the plot in detail. It’s a good one. We are introduced first to Charles Gerard (Franchot Tone), a prominent Broadway producer and composer, traveling by train to New York, with a stop in Cleveland. His jealously guarded solitude is interrupted when a vaudeville duo of singing showgirls demand that he watch their act — a brassy rendition of “Is It True What They Say About Dixie?” Gerard is the epitome of class. The girls, not so much.
The showgirls return to their seats in 2nd class and continue to kvetch about their failed audition. Sitting right behind them is Ann Carter (Durbin), who is on her way to visit her brother in New York, and not incidentally to try to make a career on the stage there. When she overhears that Gerard is on the train, she determines to find him herself, and to deliver her own audition. Little does she know that Gerard has asked the train’s porter to keep all comers away from his compartment. The porter does one better: he’ll tell everyone that Gerard is in a different compartment in a different car. So ensues the first of several very funny misfired attempts by Ann to get heard. Mistaking a certain Mr. Brophy (Andrew Tombes) for Gerard in the misdesignated compartment, she breaks into a passionate rendition of the Jurmann-Grossman tune, “In the Spirit of the Moment.” Gerard, who has left the train (we’re at the Cleveland station), hears it on the platform. He’s intrigued. He heads toward the voice, only to be blocked by a passing baggage-cart as the train pulls out of the station. Then Ann discovers to her horror that not only is Brophy not Gerard, he’s a traveling girdle salesman.
As soon as she arrives in New York, Ann heads for the posh address of her big brother, Martin (Pat O’Brien), who has deceived her into thinking that he’s a rich man. They haven’t seen each other since she was a child (a plausible motivation for his ignorance about her singing talent). Martin confesses that it’s not his crib. And though he had sent Ann a thousand bucks recently, he’s actually broke. The money was the fruit of a good bet at the races. He’s actually a butler, and his employer is none other than Gerard himself. Ann is ecstatic. Now she can sing for the real Gerard, not a girdle salesman. That way she’ll end up in one of his shows and support Martin herself. Martin ixnays her plan. One of his main jobs is to keep aspiring showgirls from bothering the great impresario. He can’t let her endanger his cush life of good cigars and whiskey, the races, and general indolence. He grudgingly puts Ann up in the vast apartment until she can get a job and find her own place. Ann befriends the housekeeper/cook, Severina (Elsa Janssen), and offers to help around the place. When Gerard returns, he thinks that Ann is a new maid, which suits Ann just fine. And though she has been warned by both Martin and Severina that there can be no singing-auditioning in Gerard’s earshot, she figures she can be the exception, and sits down at the piano. Before she can sing a note, Martin forcibly removes her from the music room. For a second time, she has been blocked — first by the baggage cart, now by her brother.
Severina forces the reluctant Martin to give Ann a real maid’s job by threatening to reveal to Gerard that his butler is a lazy bum with a passion for the ponies. And so begins the plot’s subdominant theme. His Butler’s Sister, like most of Durbin’s films, has a simplicity and elegance that’s classical in more than one sense. The more ambitious American-style Hollywood comedies of the period were strongly influenced by slapstick and vaudeville variety shows; many of them were directed and written by people who had made comedies in the silent era. So the American style put a premium on a sort of wild, kinetic originality of invention in both the visuals and the dialogue, with cascading gags, eccentric rule-breaking characters, nonsensical patter, and unpredictable plot development. Class relations were fluid enough in the democractic U.S. that audiences expected the comic action to weaken class boundaries constantly. The European comic forms, by contrast, remained loyal to the idea of the well-made play, in which all the threads are formally connected, leaving no raggedy edges. And that naturally means there can’t be very many threads. The conventional boulevard comedies, especially those on the Berlin-Vienna-Budapest axis, stuck to a formal structure that was especially classical. Plays would have two themes — a dominant one, which usually played out in the world of the upper classes, and a subdominant one, which played out on the level of the working classes. As in a classical sonata, the two themes are closely related in their development, and by the time we reach the end, they have been resolved, the main elements of the subdominant absorbed into a synthesis dominated by the main themes. Most of the Pasternak-Durbin-Koster films follow this pattern. (The pattern was also the preferred one for Hollywood B-comedies; it required smaller budgets, fewer retakes, timely shooting schedules, and predetermined editing. Most of the MAISIE series, for example, follows the same two-theme pattern. I find it interesting that Felix Jackson’s co-writer on His Butler’s Sister, Elizabeth Reinhardt, was also the co-writer of several of the MAISIE films with Mary J. McCall, Jr.)
As soon as Ann — the heroine of the dominant story, the aspiring diva who can’t get heard and is ignored by the object of her aspirations — becomes a maid, she initiates the subdominant story, as well. She becomes the darling of a society of butlers, all colleagues and friends of Ann’s brother.
The butlers are played by an all-star group — Akim Tamiroff, Sig Arno, Hans Conried, and Alan Mowbray. Smitten by her beauty and grace, so rare among the liveried class, they surround her like bees. (The butlers were in the plans from the beginning, before Durbin was ever engaged for the project. It’s said that the original story idea was to be titled My Girl Godfrey, an offshoot of La Cava’s My Man Godfrey, and was to star Carole Lombard. After Lombard’s death in a plane crash in 1942, Felix Jackson undertook a rewrite. I haven’t been able to dig up a single trace of the Lombard script or story.) All wearing identical uniforms and bowler hats, they begin to court her in tandem, each one displaying impeccably courtly manners — which will come in sharp contrast to the prole-equivalents of Gerard’s class, a gaggle of wisecracking producers and talent agents who are just as dazzled by Ann.
Ann’s first big job is to attend to the guests at a dinner party Gerard has arranged for his friends, half of whom are society snobs, the other half street-smart theater men who are smitten by Ann’s physical charms. Martin has churlishly insisted that Ann must not smile while serving the guests. It’s hard for her. One of Gerard’s guests is his fiancee, Elizabeth (Evelyn Ankers), who, like her fellow socialites considers the musical theater life to be beneath Gerard. She nudges him to give it up — and at least for the time being, to leave New York to vacation in Maine with her. While he’s preparing to leave, Ann charms the theater boys, who spend the rest of the evening in the kitchen, enaproned, to help the pretty maid with her duties.
Martin chafes at his sister’s presence. She’s cramping his style. He’s angling to get his boss to fire her. After the party, Gerard sits at his piano and languorously plays the melody to Victor Herbert’s popular ballad, “When You’re Away,” which is diegetically one of Gerard’s great hits. Ann praises it, to Gerard’s delight. When he retires to his bedroom, Ann sees another chance. She rushes to the piano and, with no Martin to stifle her, she begins to play the same tune. The scene is really fine. In his adjacent room, Gerard turns on his radio, but can only get static. As Ann sings the song in full-throated Durbin ease, Gerard thinks it’s coming from the radio. When she’s finished, Gerard waits by the radio set to hear who sang it, but gets nothing. He rushes out to the music room, the radio under his arm, passing Ann, to plug the radio in a different space. Still nothing. Flummoxed, thinking he has missed the announcement when he switched rooms (who hasn’t had that experience?), he remains unaware that it was Ann’s voice. So, for yet a third time, Ann hasn’t been able to show Gerard her stuff, even though this time she delivered a performance right into his very ears.
Gerard’s party scene is soon mirrored by its inversion, a birthday party held for one of the butlers, the Russian emigre Popoff (Akim Tamiroff, who was actually Armenian), attended by the whole crew of identically attired butlers. Believing that Ann is the most angelic of maids, each plans to propose marriage. At the dinner in a Russian restaurant, after cleverly evading all the proposals, Ann is inspired to show her chops by singing a medley of Russian songs with fine Russian diction and accompanied by the restaurant’s orchestra and chorus dressed in muzhik habille.
Earlier, Brother Martin succeeded in persuading his insufficiently stricken boss to fire Ann, just as he’s leaving for his Maine vacation. When he summons her for a final goodbye, she appears in full resplendance, dressed to attend Popoff’s do. Gerard is stunned at her graceful beauty, but it’s not enough to make him change his plans. Off he goes to Maine (so we think), and she to Popoff’s party.
It’s worth dwelling for a moment on the elegance of the story-construction here. The structural inversions are impressive. At Gerard’s party of snobs and theatrical agents, Ann is seen as maid. When she sings, she’s basically alone, since Gerard doesn’t realize he has been hearing her, and Martin is offstage. At Popoff’s reception, each of the butlers behaves with a courtliness Gerard’s guests cannot muster. At a gathering ostensibly attended by servants only, in a huge public space, she sings to universal admiration. Amazed, even her brother finally recognizes her gift. And there’s good reason. Ann’s spontaneous performance is the stuff of high Hollywood musical staging.
True to form, Gerard is not around to hear her triumph, even though he’s getting close. He arrives late to the party, having changed his mind about leaving town, and about Ann. They dance. They walk in the New York nighttime. And the inevitable good thing happens.
The intrigues speed up, perhaps too hastily, but they all make sense. They are all “plays.” Martin now wants to break up the new romance — partly as a big brother who doesn’t want his sister taken advantage of, and partly as a player who sees himself as Ann’s future manager. He persuades Gerard that Ann is playing him. Gerard, gullible, disappointed, informs Ann that he has been playing her. Ann decides to leave the whole situation. In her disappointment, she doesn’t want to sing any more, so Martin’s managerial plans seem to hit the reefs. But he has a surprise in store, for himself, too.
In a scene of comic Hollywood delirium that’s nonetheless supremely “continental,” the film concludes with a festive ball in a cavernous, elegant waltz-palace befitting an Austro-Hungarian finale. However, the invitees of the ball, apparently organized by Martin, are servants and theatricals in posh evening clothes. The butlers are masters of ceremony, Severina behaves like a Duchess, and when Gerard tries to crash the party to make it up with Ann, the in-crowd of elegant proles treat him like a nobody. Then Ann is announced. She has been persuaded to sing, after all, and performs a pretty fine rendition of Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma,” accompanied by a full orchestra. In excellent operetta/music video fashion, recognitions flower. Gerard finally hears Ann sing for the first time, and is astonished. Martin realizes that Gerard loves his sister, and that maybe he has the new role he’s looking for. And Ann, in mid-aria, sees Gerard and understands that he has come for her. And we end with a sweeping, swelling, swirling Puccini clinch.
His Butler’s Sister is an unusual Hollywood musical comedy for its time. It’s full of jokes and predicaments that seem drawn from Viennese waltz-comedies, but with inversions that would have made contemporary European audiences uncomfortable. The standard story — pretty young maid with a beautiful voice hooking up with a powerful older man who is made young again by her; an elder brother who’s a clever servant, simultaneously protecting his younger sister and looking out for himself; a ball where all class and gender differences are reconciled in festive song-and-dance — is constantly flipped. The core joke — that Ann’s beautiful voice is constantly obstructed until the very end — may be an old one, but the class reversals (the gentlemanly crew of butlers, the gorgeous Servants’ Ball, the fact that the resolution is the work of servants, Tone’s Mr. Big so passive and clueless) seem fresh to me. Even such apparently slight details as casting Franchot Tone as Gerard and Pat O’Brien as Martin seem significant to me. I’ve never seen Tone act so Brooklyn. O’Brien, for his part, gives Martin, the Big Man among the servants, a churlish quality that European comedy would never give a clever servant. He’d never land the job. The continental gaiety so important for the Vienna-Budapest boulevard comedies comes entirely from the servant class.
Some of the benign strangeness of the film surely comes from the collaboration of scriptwriters Felix Jackson (a brilliant member of the Pasternak Berlin-Vienna-Budapest cohort) and Betty Reinhardt (a veteran of the Maisie B-films, whose next script was for Laura) and director Frank Borzage. His Butler’s Sister was Borzage’s last comedy. I don’t usually care for Borzage’s comedies. A melodrama director to his bones, Borzage usually lacked comic pacing and mood, and his depiction of Gerard and Martin is heavy-handed at times. But he was a great director of actresses, and in this film Durbin is another example of it.
Summed up: yet another beautiful Durbin underappreciated gem.