Deanna Durbin and her British fans

My last blog, which took a look at the rankings of British and Hollywood film stars at the British box office during the 1930s, closed with some observations on the changes in British filmgoers’ star preferences that took place towards the end of the decade, noting that these coincided with significant shifts in meanings of femininity in Britain. (‘The distinctive tastes of British cinemagoers’, 21 March 2021′)

The year 1937 appears to mark a key moment in this regard. In that year, a musical comedy featuring an unknown teenage soprano scored a surprise hit at the British box office. Three Smart Girls (Henry Koster, US, Universal, 1936) co-stars Deanna Durbin, Nan Grey and Barbara Read as sisters who conspire to remove their father from the clutches of a gold digger and effect a reconciliation between their estranged parents. On its British release in May 1937, Picturegoer‘s reviewer Lionel Collier ranked Three Smart Girls ‘outstanding’, calling it ‘one of the year’s most entertaining pictures’; and in his annual survey of the year’s films, Film Pictorial columnist John Milford hailed its Canadian-born co-star Deanna Durbin as the success of 1937 (Picturegoer, 22 May 1937; Film Pictorial, 1 January 1938). On this occasion at least, the critics were in tune with the mood of the cinemagoer: in 1938, readers of Film Pictorial voted Durbin the year’s most popular star, and by the following year she had scored top ranking at the British box office.

Unusually, there exists quite a lot of direct evidence from contemporary cinemagoers concerning the special appeal of this young performer. One Picturegoer reader wrote to the magazine to praise Durbin: ‘In these days when the world is topsy-turvy with so much to make humanity weep, it is good to…render utmost gratitude for a talented, youthful star’s contribution to every filmgoer’s happiness’ Picturegoer, 28 January 1939). This comment catches the mood, the spirit and the content of the admiration inspired by Deanna Durbin, and suggests that her popularity was as deep as it was wide. There was clearly something about the Durbin image which seized the imaginations and stirred the hearts of millions of young cinemagoers.

Animation of the various outfits of our Deanna Durbin Paper Doll (CMA-AK-96-001MM001)

A study of film stars and of audiences’ responses to them offers a useful route to understanding those affective aspects of film reception which are the key to any proper understanding of cinema culture. Film stars being at once real–they are living human beings–and unreal–their presence on screen is in effect an absence–constitute ideal figures of fantasy, objects of desire, identification and projection. In the film industry–particularly in the ‘age of the dream palace’–film stars stood for ideals of glamour and success of a sort that could scarcely figure in the day-to-day lives of most cinemagoers. They also held out models for the era’s nascent consumerism, and models of success based in an individualistic ethos. To this extent, there is a considerable element of aspiration in many forms of fan worship. Such aspiration may then translate itself into consciously held beliefs and attitudes and outwardly expressed behaviours.

This seems to be true of the fan worship surrounding Deanna Durbin in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In 1945, in a pioneering in-depth study of cinemagoers’ ‘experiences and self-interpretations’, the sociologist J.P. Mayer visited cinemas to talk to audiences and distribute questionnaires. Through the pages of Picturegoer, he invited readers to write essays and letters expressing their feelings about the films and about how cinema had affected their behaviour. Despite the fact that in 1945 her heyday as a star had already passed, Deanna Durbin is mentioned spontaneously, and always with great enthusiasm and warmth, in many of the replies Mayer received. These responses suggest that Durbin inhabited the inner lives of her male fans as a much idealised fantasy object; while for her female fans she offered a model for behaviour and self-image in their own daily lives:

‘I fell in love with Deanna Durbin and my love has grown for her every day. It is not  just calf love or a passing infatuation but it’s the real thing’ (male, age 28)

‘Deanna Durbin…not only inspires both young and old with the melody of her voice,  but also has the power to stimulate and sustain me….When Deanna sings she seems to sing to me alone’ (male, age 39)

‘I wanted to be as much like her as possible, both in my manners and clothes….If I found myself in any annoying or aggravating situation…I found myself wondering what Deanna would do, and modified my own reactions accordingly. She had far more influence on me than any amount of lectures or rows from parents would have had’ (female, age 22)

‘It was Deanna whom I have to thank for initiating me into my first attempt at curling my hair….Of course, my mother had to be consulted, but she agreed with me that if it was all right for Deanna, then it should be all right for me…’. (female, age 22)

‘I used to tell my “boy-friend of the moment” to note the way Robert Stack held Deanna in his arms and kissed her [in First Love]’ (female, age 19)

‘I wore boleros, when I was fourteen or so, because Deanna Durbin did, and boleros were obviously youthful and becoming to girls of that age’ (female, age 19)

‘I model the majority of my wardrobe on the clothes Miss Durbin wears. I pride myself they suit me, and therefore I feel confident in myself (for surely you know how much nice clothes go towards a woman’s poise and mannerisms!)’ (female, age 19)[i]

These testimonies indicate that for her fans Deanna Durbin in various ways represented ‘higher things’. For the women at least, this sense of elevation and inspiration translates itself into modes of self-expression and behaviour in their day-to-day lives, into their images of themselves as young women, and into their experiments with clothes, cosmetics, and courtship behaviour.

It is often noted that the root of star appeal lies in the capacity of a star image to appear at once extraordinary and ordinary. A gap between star and fan is opened up, and in it flourishes desire–‘I want to be like her’; while at the same time there is a sense of familiarity, attainability–‘I can be like her’. The Durbin star image mobilises this play of ordinary and extraordinary to construct, inter alia, a model of youthful femininity which sits well with a newly aspirational, and slightly daring, modern woman who enters cultural currency in late 1930s Britain.[ii] At the same time, the image lies within the reach of the ‘ordinary’ adolescent girl, rendering it both acceptable and attainable (‘if it was all right for Deanna, then it should be all right for me’). This offers a mix of safety and risk which might have obvious appeal to an adolescent at a time when girls in their teens were still regarded as children, and when there existed few models to help them negotiate the transition from girlhood to womanhood.

From the start of her film career, articles about Deanna Durbin in the popular press stressed both her extraordinary musical gifts and her very ordinary qualities as a schoolgirl. A month or two before the release of Three Smart Girls, for example, Picturegoer alerted its readers to the forthcoming debut of ‘a young girl with a fully matured voice of opera quality’, who nonetheless must carry on attending to her lessons and taking care of her pet spaniel be’ (‘Fair, famous and fourteen’, Picturegoer, 6 March 1937). As Deanna rose to fame, emphasis was laid increasingly upon her normality and naturalness: she is just ‘an ordinary nice American girl’ who happens to love music and can’t help singing (‘Schoolgirl star’, Film Weekly‘ 29 May 1937). And she is being sensibly brought up by a caring and watchful mother for whom Deanna is ‘that rare, refreshing combination of youth, sophistication and talent that every mother hopes her daughter will be’ (‘Bringing up a breadwinner’, Picturegoer, 4 February 1939). As the Durbin cult filtered into the cultural competences of young British women, references to ‘smart girls’ became ubiquitous.

In her screen persona as much as in her star image, Deanna Durbin figures as the ideal role model for the adolescent girl negotiating familial constraints and nascent femininity. The basic Durbin film character is a matchmaker, an effervescent teenager who innocently–but not without encountering trouble on the way–meddles in the affairs of adults. In the end, she always wins through to a happy ending, an uplifting song and a beaming smile.[iii] The screen persona of a young woman whose youthful enthusiasm and energy fuels her determination to solve the problems of the adults around her endeared Durbin to her young fans, while rendering her acceptable to their parents.

The fuss about Durbin’s first screen kiss–in First Love (Henry Koster, US, Universal 1939)–is most revealing in this context. Anticipated in the British popular film press for nearly two years, and already held out as a tease in at least two of her films (the titles of That Certain Age [Edward Ludwig, US, Universal, 1938] and Three Smart Girls Grow Up [Henry Koster, US, Universal, 1939] reveal much about the nature of the Durbin image and the discourses around adolescence and femininity it embodied), the long awaited clinch was characteristically esteemed by British critics to be in the best of taste, eschewing ‘the polluting influence of Hollywood’s diseased mind’, and ‘handled with the most immaculate respect for standards of good taste and common sense’ (‘Deanna’s first kiss’, Picturegoer, 30 December 1939).

The star persona of Deanna Durbin and the fandom that surrounded her in the years immediately before and after the outbreak of World War II condense key discourses around cinema culture and femininity in circulation during that period. Durbin stands at once for the consistent popularity of musical comedy films and stars with British cinemagoers, for the distinctiveness of British audiences’ preferences among Hollywood stars and films, for an idiosyncratically British predilection for juvenile stars, and for the ‘good taste’ and ‘quality’ demanded by sections of the British filmgoing public. At the same time, her rise to fame forms part of the broader shift in British filmgoers’ tastes apparent after 1937. As an adolescent girl, Durbin also stands for a typical British cinemagoer of the period, while her unusual musical talent gestures towards a world distant from that in which the average working-class and lower-middle-class British girl lived her daily life. Durbin stands above all for new femininities which entered cultural circulation in the late 1930s and fed into wartime models of British womanhood.

 

CMDA assets relating to Deanna Durbin include:

Cinegram No.5: 100 Men and a Girl. 1938. AK-96-001PM003

Bolton’s Tatler: Front Page with 100 Men and a Girl. March 1938. CM-20-001RP021

Picturegoer Cover: Deanna Durbin and Melvyn Douglas in That Certain Age. 28 January 1939. CM-20-001AR055

Woman: Three Smart Girls Cosmetics advertisement. 1 July 1939. CM-20-001AD003

Sheet music: Silent Night, Holy Night. 1945. AK-96-001SM001

Celebrity Paper Dolls “Deanna Durbin”. 1991. AK-96-001MM001

W.E. Mills. The Deanna Durbin Fairy Tale. 1996. AK-96-001BK010

 

Endnotes:

[i]           The first and the last two quotations are from J.P. Mayer, Sociology of Film: Studies and Documents (London: Faber and Faber, 1946), pp.182, 237 and 188; the rest are from his British Cinemas and Their Audiences: Sociological Studies (London: Dennis Dobson Ltd, 1948), pp.60, 90, 83, and 42.

[ii]           For a more detailed discussion see Annette Kuhn, ‘Cinema culture and femininity in the 1930s’, in Christine Gledhill and Gillian Swanson (eds), Nationalising Femininity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996: 177-192.

[iii]          William K. Everson, ‘The career of Deanna Durbin’, Films in Review, vol.27, no.9 (1976), pp.513-29.