Word: deanna
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Nice Girl? (Universal) abruptly halts the string of eight pleasant, sprightly tuneful Deanna Durbin films which have been the financial anchor of Universal Pictures Co. for the last four years. In it, grinning little Producer Joe Pasternak, who has nurtured Deanna like a prize petunia, has gone wildly askew with a somnolent essay on bourgeois life in a small New England town...
...Hollywood's most polished performers-'Robert Benchley, Walter Brennan, Helen Broderick, Franchot Tone. But their efforts to keep the aimless, insipid Richard Connell-Gladys Lehman screen play afloat are like the haphazard courage of doomed men. Benchley as a widower highschool principal with three lightheaded daughters (Deanna, Anne Gwynne, Ann Gillis) looks as if he were trying to get by unrecognized. Since there is no observable plot, the rest of the characters just meander around the Benchley household, where Brennan, the village postman, is required to make middle-aged puppy love to Miss Broderick, Benchley's housekeeper...
...Engaged. Deanna Durbin, 19, singing cinemiss; and Vaughn Paul, 25, associate producer, son of Val Paul (Universal studio manager), with whom Deanna has kept company ever since her parents allowed her to have dates. In her next film. Producer Joe Pasternak will let Deanna get engaged on the screen...
Joseph Valentine (Guiseppe Valentino), who calls himself a "dago wop," has followed Deanna Durbin's cinema growth from a pup. Most great reputations in the business are built on subdued arty effects -the specialties of Toland, Gaudio and chunky Chinese James Wong Howe-but Valentine has won his colors with gaiety. The lilt he catches in the gait of Deanna Durbin swinging along, singing a song, is the difference between making a musical bright and fluffy or allowing it to settle like cold soufflé. Dark, athletic, with a Cupid's-bow mustache, Valentine is a leader...
...that the imperialistic monarchs dethroned after World War I were just costumed Good-fellows whose apparent preoccupation with the pomp of politics could be easily sidetracked in order to help untangle a romance. When Spring Parade's Franz Josef cozily wrinkles his nose at a pretty peasant girl (Deanna Durbin) sometime circa 1896, he means that he is going to make sure she gets the drummer (Robert Cummings) in the Emperor's band with whom she has had a nasty spat. This is the essence of the plot around which bounding little Producer Joe Pasternak has molded installment...