The Durbin Effect

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Every Sunday (1936), an MGM musical short, is a precious document that introduces two adolescent girls--two remarkable talents--Judy Garland and Deanna Durbin. Head of studio Louis B. Mayer was apparently furious when, after putting Garland under contract, Durbin became such a huge success so quickly, for a rival studio, Universal. Garland, of course, went on to become a screen legend, her films frequently revived. Durbin, fed up with the generally mediocre material in which she was cast, abandoned Hollywood and the movie business, show business in fact, in 1948 when she was only twenty-seven years old.  Both of them have cult followings but Durbin is far less well known today. Contemporary viewers are often puzzled to learn that Deanna Durbin is credited with having saved Universal from bankruptcy with her feisty adolescent nature and her precocious voice. In a series of films directed by Henry Koster, she was, for ten years, sensationally popular in the United States and England.

Co-starring in Durbin’s second feature, One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937), was Leopold Stokowski. The renowned conductor’s reaction to her rendition of Mozart’s “Allelulia” (from Exsultate, jubilate) mirrored that of amazed moviegoers, particularly those familiar with Mozart and the classically-trained voice. However much expert coaching went into Durbin’s impeccable delivery of the piece, the fifteen-year-old seems to be to the manner born. Of course, what makes her a movie star is the ability to project so palpably her personality, her feelings, her joy in music and in singing. Her pluckiness remains a significant image of America in the late '30's.

Durbin's voice, healthily equalized throughout her range, and her refined musicality take on particular value when she is compared to the "legit" sopranos who attained stardom in the 1940s, Jane Powell and Kathryn Grayson. Although Powell and Grayson are technically proficient, capable of the coloratura flexibility that audiences loved, they lack Durbin’s immediately recognizable sweetness. Like Garland, Durbin was a talented actress with an individual, recognizable style. That style, consonant with her musical discipline, is perceived in the fluent, rapid-fire, but utterly clear delivery of dialogue with irresistible impetus and energy, often with a dash of irony that never smacks of bratishness but rather, of real intelligence, and with a warm personality that echoes her singing/speaking voice. This served her ongoing popularity in "grown-up" roles of the 1940s. It Started with Eve (1941) pits her verbal virtuosity against the formidable Charles Laughton—the outcome is a draw. (Alas, I have found no extended excerpt from their scenes together to include in this post).

In this short scene from Spring Parade (1940), Durbin exhibits the charm, the verve, and the spirit that captivated movie audiences. Here, in a variation of the “Little Miss Fix-it” she played through her ‘teens, she promotes the musical career of a young composer. It is with enormous relief that the song, first bellowed by the relentlessly grinning Robert Cummings, finally takes wing when she chimes in.

In Christmas Holiday (1944), directed by a master of film noir, Robert Siodmak, and written by Herman J. Mankiewicz (responsible for the script of Citizen Kane), her dramatic role suggests that at a different studio, with perhaps a higher degree of ambition, she would not have truncated her career so abruptly. The visual context of noir melodrama enhances the final confrontation between the guilt-ridden, distraught Abigail (Durbin) and Robert, her deranged husband (Gene Kelly).

Christmas Holiday is the sole melodrama in Durbin’s filmography. The “Western” musical Can’t Help Singing (1944), another rare effort to vary the formula, is her only feature shot in Technicolor. The film features musical numbers (Jerome Kern’s last score) staged on location. I end this post with Durbin singing “Any Moment Now” in scenery that matches the “wonderland” of E. Y. Harburg’s lyrics.

“Pépé le Moko” in “Algiers”

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Remakes have been coin of the realm as long as cinema has been a commercial enterprise. A proven success is somewhat of a guarantee that its subsequent refashioning will also attract audiences. The new version may be updated, relocated, reconceived. It may take advantage of newer technologies, as was the case when silent films were remade as talkies. And at the dawn of the talkies, the late 1920s and early 1930s, the major U.S. studios made it a practice to reshoot their films for foreign markets nearly simultaneously, utilizing the same sets and stagings, in French, Spanish, and German. The mirror-imaging of one culture’s product, albeit in a different language, soon proved unsatisfactory. But the significant refashioning of a property in the same language, or in another, has inspired some directors to re-create major works. Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945), based on Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (1931), immediately comes to mind. And Hitchcock topped his own 1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much with his own remake in 1956.

The case of Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko and John Cromwell’s Algiers is unusual in that the Hollywood remake of the French-language film, more a throwback to the simultaneous copy of the early sound era than a recasting of the original, enjoyed enormous success. As I mentioned in my previous post, producer Walter Wanger was determined to recycle as much of Pépé le moko as he could--musical score, the location shots of Algiers, the set design, the staging. Great swaths of the dialogue are literal translations from the French. There are subtle differences between the two pictures, mostly in the loss of texture and the depiction of the denizens of the Casbah, the women, in particular, whose presentation more clearly identifies them as prostitutes in the French version. Again, as I mentioned in my last post, the individualities of the stars, Jean Gabin and Charles Boyer are pronounced. And the leading actresses, Mireille Ballin and Hedy Lamarr in addition to their physical difference, supply distinctive tones to their roles, Ballin brittle, quick with repartee, a woman who knows her way around and has no illusions, Lamarr, more languorous, yielding, sadder.

Take a look at the final scene in each film. The similarities are striking. Yes, the U.S. version is less detailed than the French, but the positioning of the characters creates the same effect in each. More interesting is the obvious difference. First, the French version. (I was unable to find a copy of this excerpt in French. This clip is from the Italian language version. The sequence has very little dialogue.)

Now, the Hollywood version.

Pépé’s death becomes a suicide by cop. Since the U.S. production code frowned on suicide, this became the solution to the problem. The elimination of the much of Inès’ anguished participation and the addition of the hero’s words as he dies, achieves a less bleak resolution.

John Cromwell had the unenviable task of simulating the work of Julien Duvivier, a director at the peak of his career, and of tailoring a picture to the expectations of the Catholic Legion of Decency and the U. S. moviegoing public. And in the spirit of maintaining an urgent narrative rhythm, he eliminated Tania’s song, one of the most memorable scenes of Pépé le Moko. Tightly woven into the rich atmosphere of the original movie, Tania, a minor character, the “woman” of a member of Pépé’s band of thieves, sits with the despondent Pépé. The disappointed lover believes that Gaby has stood him up. And with the loss of Gaby he has lost his dream of Paris, the city and the life she represents. Played by beloved music-hall singer Fréhel, the blowsy Tania expresses the despair she shares with Pépé, her yearning for Paris and the memory of her former self, when she was a star. She cranks a turntable and places the needle on the record. The camera pivots to a photo of the pretty, young Fréhel and lingers a long moment before pivoting back to the singer who at first listens to her own voice, then joins in the nostalgic song, recalling the particular square, the Place Blanche in Paris, that linked Pépé and Gaby as they fell in love in the Casbah of Algiers. Fréhel/Tania sings “Où sont-ils?” (Where have they gone). The distance between the two images and the two voices of Fréhel is an indelible evocation of the spatial and temporal alienation that supply the movie’s pulse.

One final word about Tania. In Algiers she is played by Nina Koshetz, a renowned and highly regarded opera and concert singer. We can only conjecture that she was cast in the role because there was to be a song for her, and we can only regret that we do not get to hear it.