Complete credited cast: | |||
Claude Rains | ... | Adam Lemp | |
Jeffrey Lynn | ... | Felix Deitz | |
John Garfield | ... | Mickey Borden | |
Frank McHugh | ... | Ben Crowley | |
May Robson | ... | Aunt Etta | |
Gale Page | ... | Emma Lemp | |
Dick Foran | ... | Ernest | |
Vera Lewis | ... | Mrs. Ridgefield | |
Tom Dugan | ... | Jake | |
Eddie Acuff | ... | Sam | |
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Donald Kerr | ... | Earl |
Priscilla Lane | ... | Ann Lemp | |
Rosemary Lane | ... | Kay Lemp | |
Lola Lane | ... | Thea Lemp |
Adam Lemp, the Dean of the Briarwood Music Foundation, has passed on his love of music to his four early adult daughters - Thea, Emma, Kay and Ann - who live with him and his sister, the girls' Aunt Etta, in the long time family home. Of the four, Kay has the greatest promise as a musical performer, specifically as a singer. Theirs is a loving family, however much the girls exasperate their father with their love of popular music, since he loves only the classics, most specifically Beethoven. The girls support each other however they can, but each is an individual with her own distinct personality and wants, including the type of man each wants as a husband. Practical but deep in her heart romantic Emma has long been courted by their next door neighbor, unassuming florist Ernest Talbot, and clever Thea wants to be Mrs. Ben Crowley, he a wealthy up and coming banker with prospects. Only the youngest, the fun loving Ann, states that she doesn't want to get married. Their collective ... Written by Huggo
A tight-knit musical family, cranky-benevolent father and four vivacious adolescent daughters, is up-rooted by, first, the appearance of Felix, a dashing young composer, and, secondly and most profoundly, Mickey, his insolently attractive orchestrator friend.
It takes a while for Michael Curtiz to get this piece of Americana floating. The first part looks almost like a paraphrasing of a cereal commercial, not without a certain quaint, highly bourgeois charm, and then John Garfield enters the scene as the doomed Mickey, making his first appearance in motion pictures, with mussed-up black curls, sleepy, hung-over eyes, rude and disheveled, the absolute opposite to Jeffrey Lynn's smoothly persuasive, madly charming Felix. Garfield is in complete, and DIRELY needed, counterpoint to the rest of the household ("Nothing I would do would surprise me", he muses), and suddenly the movie becomes interesting, although I agree with critics that find the plot-turns insufficiently motivated.
The four sisters are rather blandly played and seriously underwritten, but Claude Rains as the pater familias has his moments.
Watch it for Garfield, though, he is the only really lasting thing about it.