Deanna Durbin’s beautiful singing voice catapulted her to stardom during Hollywood’s Golden Age. From her film debut in 1936 at the age of 15 to her retirement in 1949, her charming personality and singing voice made her America’s sweetheart, as well as one of the highest paid actresses in the movies, something that made her one of the highest paid women in the world
Born in Canada, her parents moved to Los Angeles when she was little more than a toddler. By the age of ten she became the star pupil of one of Hollywood’s top vocal instructors. Her beautiful soprano led to a screen test and she was signed to a movie contract in 1936 at the age of 15.
Her first full-length film, Three Smart Girls, was so popular that many more light-hearted romantic teen musicals followed as quickly as possible. All of them featured at least two or three Durbin’ solos ranging from pop to operatic areas. It is said that the success of these light comedies saved Universal Studios from bankruptcy.
As she matured, she tired of the frothy comedies that had made her famous and wanted better material. She got one chance in 1944 when she played the lead in Christmas Holiday, a film adaptation of a novel of the same name by famed British author, Somerset Maugham.
The novel has very little to do with Christmas. Set in the 1930s, it is the story of a young Englishman from a respectable middle-class family who has completed his schooling, and is about to enter the family business. Before doing so, his father treats him to a holiday in Paris over the Christmas holidays. It is to be a typical middle-class excursion where he will see all the sites, visit the art museums, and attend various concerts including a Midnight Mass celebration, a major Parisian event.
On arrival in Paris, he meets up with an old friend, now a typical 30s radical, who takes him to a high-class bordello, where he meets a beautiful Russian émigré prostitute. When she discovers that he plans to attend Midnight Mass, she begs him to let her join him. During the service in a packed cathedral, she breaks down in hysterical sobbing. Over the next few days, she tells him her tragic story, and introduces him to a side of life that he has never experienced or even imagined. In Maugham’s words, the bottom falls out of his life.
The Hollywood Production Code required major changes in the film adaptation. Even without the Code, Deanna Durbin’s persona would never have allowed her to play a prostitute on screen. Instead, she plays a singer in a dance hall dive that is a thinly disguised bordello. The young Englishman is transformed into a newly commissioned, young American army officer whose fiancée has jilted him for another man. The locale has been shifted to New Orleans, where the officer’s flight home has been forced to land during a storm. The free-thinking friend has become a sleazy newspaper reporter who doubles as a pimp for the New Orleans dive where Durbin’s character works.
Despite these changes the film is remarkably true to Maugham’s novel with its emphasis on tragic love, sin, suffering, and redemption. Christmas Holiday is a dark film superbly directed by Robert Siodmak, one of the great masters of what would later become known as film noir. The writer, Herman Mankiewicz of Citizen Kane fame, produced a brilliant script full of rare depth and meaning. The screen play is supported by a musical score created by Austrian Hans Salter that ranged from Durbin’s rendition of Irving Berlin’s ballad, Always, to a version of Wagner’s Liebestod performed in a packed concert hall, and at the film’s finale.
Speaking of the finale, the film’s creators dramatically changed what I consider to be Maugham’s very weak and ambiguous ending. The film ending is still somewhat ambiguous but like the rest of the film, the direction, the acting, the writing, and the musical score transcend the novel on which it is based.
Deanna Durbin regarded Christmas Holiday as her best performance. She certainly demonstrated that the child singer had become a fine mature actress. In my opinion, most of her other films, despite their great popularity, are hard to watch today. One exception is It Started with Eve, a charming 1941 romantic comedy in which she stars along with Charles Laughton and Robert Cummings.
In this "screwball" comedy her youthful charm and vivacity, as well as her singing revive a dying old man, played superbly by Laughton. When she accompanies herself on the piano with a spirited version of “When I Sing,” set to the music of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty Waltz, you can see how she revived American audiences during the Great Depression and the war years.
Deanna Durbin’s fame did not last unlike that of Judy Garland's, another teenage singer who became a huge star. Despite her box office success, Durbin never appeared in any immortal film musicals like the Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, Easter Parade, or A Star is Born. Perhaps even more important was the fact that she decided to quit show business in 1949 at the age of 28. After two failed marriages, she married a Frenchman who had directed one of her last films. They decided to quit Hollywood and move to a farm in France where she spent the rest of her life until her death at the age of 91 in 2013. When one considers the tragic life of Judy Garland, who can say that Durbin made the wrong decision?
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Note: Christmas Holiday can be found on DVD, or viewed on YouTube where many of her songs may be found. Here is a link to her first number in the film, "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year." Or view the brief video below.
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