OVP: Four Daughters (1938)

Film: Four Daughters (1938)

Stars: Priscilla Lane, Rosemary Lane, Lola Lane, Gale Page, Claude Rains, John Garfield, Jeffrey Lynn, May Robson

Director: Michael Curtiz

Oscar History: 5 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor-John Garfield, Adapted Screenplay, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

We will likely in July restart the Sunday Leftovers series (I had one too many things on my plate over the past few weeks as I began to resume normal activities outside the house, and I needed to lift one of them-this ended up being the culprit), which will be nice because we're now in the 1950's for Hitchcock, so it'll be difficult for you to guess which movies we're still hitting in the coming weeks, and therefore each starlet is going to be a surprise.  But I'm going to spoil one today, and let you know one of Hitchcock's leading ladies who won't be part of our series this year: Priscilla Lane.  The star of 1942's Saboteur, best known today for her work as Cary Grant's hapless fiancee in Arsenic and Old Lace, was briefly a headliner for Warner Brothers in the late 1930's & early 1940's.  That fame was largely a byproduct of Four Daughters, a movie that Priscilla made with her sisters Rosemary & Lola, and which resulted in an unusual franchise (both Four Wives and Four Mothers would follow in the coming years).  While we'll get to Saboteur later this year in our 2021 devoted to Hitchcock, today we're going to take a look at how Priscilla Lane's stardom commenced.

(Spoilers Ahead) Four Daughters is a story about the Lemp sisters: Ann (Priscilla), Kay (Rosemary), Thea (Lola), and Emma (Gale Page, the only one of the sisters who wasn't an actual blood relative in real life), all very musical and doted upon by their conductor father Adam (Rains).  At the beginning of the film, Thea is courted by a wealthy young bachelor, whom she eventually marries, and this kind of sets the stage for the remainder of the film, as the movie keeps us guessing over which of the suitors that are parading around the Lemp house are going to eventually end up with the beautiful daughters.  The primary love square exists between Emma & Ann, both of whom are initially in love with Felix (Lynn), a promising young composer who is clearly smitten with Ann, but Ann, not wanting to destroy her sister's heart, runs off with Felix's friend Mickey (Garfield), a vagabond composer who always "gets the short end of life."  As the film progresses, Emma realizes that the boy-next-door was her great love, not Felix, and when Ann returns, she's heartbroken that she gave up Felix for nothing, and is in a relationship that while loving, isn't what she wanted.  Mickey realizes that Felix is better for Ann, and commits suicide in an automobile accident.  The movie ends with Felix & Ann together again, Mickey dead, and three sisters happily in relationships (poor Kay ends up being the Mary Bennett of the group, continually singing by the piano).

The movie suffers pretty quickly from tonal issues, and they bog down the whole film.  The first 15 minutes or so are a delight, with all of the sisters showing a strong chemistry with one another (Rosemary being my favorite of the bunch), but as the movie progresses it becomes clear that it can't sustain a focus on four female characters without them having a bunch of men to fight over, and it becomes a more standard-issue romantic drama.  This is a problem because while Rosemary Lane is funny in a side role, the two primary women, played by Priscilla and Page, are kind of boring.  Page is beautiful but sort of a porcelain doll, never emoting past what her eyes are telling us, and Priscilla Lane's Ann is, and I mean this in the nicest possible way (I love Arsenic and Old Lace), kind of annoying.  There's a scene a third of the way through the film where she chastises John Garfield's Mickey, whom she's just met, for not laughing the second she wants him to.  Garfield refuses, and she instantly judges him even though she's kind of ridiculous for treating a stranger such a way (even in 1938).  Lane, who was 23 when this movie was released, plays Ann like she's 14, and never really matures her as the film goes on, and it gets weird considering by the end of the film she's literally a widow.

This is just one of several tonal problems with the movie.  The film's direction is all-over-the-place.  The sequence where Garfield kills himself suddenly shifts into the style of a 1940's noir, and then we're back in Frank Capra land in about three minutes after he dies, and it's clear that Curtiz doesn't really know how to manage the four different sisters, differentiating them enough for the audience to care about them as separate entities (by the end, it's mostly just "Ann" and "the other ones").  It's funny, except when it's deadly serious, and the jokes are repeated often (think of how Felix & Mickey flirt with Aunt Etta, played by May Robson, with virtually the same lines).  The script doesn't work, and the sound nomination is maybe plausible to a degree (there's lots of singing, I suppose), but the only thing that stood out to me was the grating, nauseating noise of the hinge on the front gate, which is repeatedly used as a comic device but literally had me covering my ears as the movie progresses.

The thing here, is, though, that there's a part of Four Daughters that really worked for me...except it doesn't work at all for the movie itself, and that's John Garfield.  Garfield, for those who aren't as familiar with him since he didn't have a lot of classic films under-his-belt before his untimely death at the age of 39, was a forerunner of the likes of Marlon Brando & James Dean, a young naturalistic performer that wasn't conventionally handsome, but still exuded a heat onscreen that was undeniable.  During Garfield's first scene onscreen, he is playing the piano like a virtuoso, in a clean-cut house, smoking a cigarette to its ashy end, and casually flirting with Aunt Etta, and it's...sexy.  John Garfield in this movie is smoldering, like, there's no denying it.  His character arch, as a man that doesn't quite know how to handle good news, and is clearly not the "right choice" for Ann even though he obviously loves her, is heartbreaking, but in most movies of this era, he'd be made to be a louse or a cad, deserving the eventual death that's coming his way.  Garfield doesn't play him that way, though-he's so engrained into this performer, that he is making him feel rich & complex onscreen, so that you leave feeling something you'd normally have to wait until at least 1940's noir, if not 1950's melodrama to get to-he's a three-dimensional human being.

The problem is that this is not the right approach for a movie like Four Daughters, where Garfield's acting is on such another level it feels like an anachronism.  It's not just better than anyone else onscreen, it's also a totally out-of-place.  Him next to Priscilla Lane's perky sweet Ann isn't just opposites attracting, it feels like they're in a different movie, and honestly it reads as kind of weird.  This is totally a great performance, and obviously this was the kind of film that a studio executive would watch & realize they had a talent on their hands...but within the confines of Four Daughters, it doesn't fit.