1h 33min | Comedy, Musical, Romance | 2 February 1947
Director: William A. Seiter
Stars: Deanna Durbin, Tom Drake, William Bendix, Adolphe Menjou.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039484/
bootleg, ok/mediocre copy.
DD sings 4 songs. TD is still very attractive, playing shy here. WB and AM bring their stock characters, as we expect, and would be disappointed if they didn't. It's frothy fluff; they used pink on the poster because it's cotton candy.
Is it a small fib to say you're married when you're not? And then identify the spouse (TD), sending the rich guy (AM) to hire him? Are there academic categories for these already? We have comedy of remarriage; do we have comedy of deception? (The first has a Wikipedia page; the second pulls a bunch of sites discussing Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing, but not a generalized one.) This wouldn't really qualify as UNintended consequences, because DD knows AM's intent, and goes to TD to prep him, but AM gets there first. But she doesn't know TD well enough to know how strident he is about honesty.
WB is a facilitator, encouraging her lies, and TD is his attorney, which ensured their link once her relationship with WB solidifies.
It's cute, and it's played for comedy, but I prefer misunderstandings over deceptions. Better that people should be silly enough to assume something and not to dig deeper, rather than being deliberately duped. The Production Code supposedly regulated against showing how to commit crimes, and criminals were supposed to be brought to justice (whether judicial or provident). But deliberate deceptions are ok, and everyone can live happily ever after without negative consequence. It's on the same continuum, just a matter of degree of severity. And that's why we have a legal system: to define what is so severe that society must intrude.
In this plot, the happy ending is only possible because AM profited from something TD prevented. So he's happy to have an honest attorney for once. When you peel back the fluff, it's actually cynical. (But that's to be expected with AM in the cast.) The only real hope for DD & TD is that she hasn't learned to embrace deception as a sound methodology; there's hope for that because she wasn't shown to be deceptive before meeting WB.
I like the film, more than a 6, but the plot makes me frown. Probably if TD hadn't been created as so strongly honest, I wouldn't have such a lengthy reaction.
Universal, dir. Seiter; 6+
