OUTSTANDING FILMS

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 84, 9 April 1938, Page 7

OUTSTANDING FILMS

DEANNA DURBIN'S BEST

A FATHER-HUNTING FANTASY

•' The crowded and appreciative house that greeted Deanna Durbin last evening in the St. James Theatre was de-served-and, indeed, inevitable-be-cause the picture ("Mad About Mus.c ) gives the fifteen-year-old, star eyeiy opportunity to present girlish adoles; cence at its best and sweetest, vamp pictures starring sophisticated acti esses are a caricature of love and of genuine feelings. But the public gets the genuine article when it sees and hears Deanna Durbin in a. human picture like "Mad About Music." To escape from the exotic and the erotic and the sophisticated, and to get back to nature with unspoilt Deanna is a inofound relief. It must be the piayer of many that Deanna may never_gu>w up. She gives something that Hollywood maturity cannot give. People who dre not expeit at. analysing film-plays or stage-plays enjoy Deanna Durbin pictures to me utmost, because of their simplicity. People of an analytical frame of mind also find much to interest them. They see that picture-building for an adoiescent star is quite unlike picture-build-ing around a mature actress, oiven an ordinary Hollywood star, the picture-builder next searches for her lover. Not so in the case of Deanna Durbin; for her, he seeks a lather. Father-hunting has a big advantage over lover-hunting, because loveihunting on the screen has became more than a bit stale. Father-hunting is one of the few forms of hunting not yet over-done. ';' As this picture develops, one gradually recognises the great art with which it has been built up. In both "Three Smart Girls" and "A Hundied Men and a Girl," Deanna started out fully equipped with a father, and a useful father he proved to be; but in "Mad About Music" she is fatherless, and is forced into finding a male parent for herself, ofl her own bat. lnis quest bears a faint resemblance to a love-quest, but it is only faint—ioi Deanna has to be kept young and heart-whole; the time for a Daddy Long-Legs" theme with Herbert Maishall is not yet. At the opposite extreme is the boy-anfl-girl affair with Jackie Moran; here again it is only the hint of passion—not its reality. Both Herbert Marshall, the adopted father, and Jackie Moran, the blushing boy, do their parts uncommonly well. They enter not too far, and just far enough, into Deanna's picture. The picturebuilder has piloted the girl star neatly through some of the shoals of adolescence, but not yet into the rapids of love and passion. . Whether in future pictures he can shoot these rapids, and yet preserve Deanna's girlishness, time only can say. . „,, , But, whatever the future, m • Mad About Music" audiences can enjoy to the full the Deanna Durbin they so quickly loved in the two earlier pictures. They can enjoy her delightful personality—its charm and its sparkling comedy. She is "mad about music only to the extent of Gounod's Aye Maria" (with the Vienna Boys' Choir) and three light modern efforts, or which "I Love to Whistle" (sung by principal and chorus on bicycles) is the most outstanding. The star's singing is part of her radiant self, and it would be a deprivation to hear her without seeing her, so much do the song and the singer become one. The same may be said of the supporting girls. Among many examples of girlish beauty in the Swiss girls' school, Marcia Mac Jones stands out as "Olga." . The nasty girl ("Felece") is played by Helen Parrish. .. . Herbert Marshall's father is the land, of father to be expected from this accomplished actor; he finds himself pounced upon in a railway station by Deanna, who has to produce a father at all costs, in order to substantiate her own imaginatory inventions. Gradually Marshall gathers that he has to pose as an African explorer-hunter, in which character Deanna had painted her imaginary father to impress her girl friends. Marshall wades through oceans of mendacity and has Arthur Treacher as a comedy-support. Gail Patrick is not only Deanna's mother but also (as a screen star of the emotional type) represents just the kind of Hollywood product that Deanna Durbin (at present) is not. The more the audience contemplates the ordinary Hollywood , star- as suggested by Deanna's mother, the more the audience must delight in the fresh and youthful personality of Deanna herself. This also is part of the art of the picture. It is a picture that no one should miss.

In addition to the main feature there are a number of excellent supports including news reels and a cartoon, a "stranger than fiction," and a New Zealand film centred about the Chateau Tongariro and showing the beauties of the mountains and the skiing on the slopes