NICE GIRL

MOVIE INFORMATION:
Universal Studios – 1941
1 Hour, 35 Minutes
Black & White

MAIN CREDITS:
Producer…Joe Pasternak
Director…William Seiter
Screenplay…Richard Connell
Music…Charles Previn

MAIN CHARACTERS:
Jane Dana…Deanna Durbin
Richard Calvert…Franchot Tone
Don Webb… Robert Stack
Oliver Dana…Robert Benchley
Hector Titus…Walter Brenan
Cora Foster…Helen Broderick
Sylvia Dana…Anne Gwynne
Nancy Dana…Ann Gillis

MOVIE SYNOPSIS:
Oliver Dana is an author working on a new book on nutrition. His eldest daughter, Sylvia is an actress and his youngest daughter, Nancy loves to be noticed by the boys. Jane is his middle daughter and she is fed up with her nice girl image. Jane's long time boyfriend, Don Webb is more interested in cars than romance which upsets Jane. One night a telegram is delivered to the Dana house. The telegram says that a scientist named Richard Calvert is visiting Oliver to evaluate him for a possible fellowship. Jane drives to the railway station to pick-up the scientist and is surprised to see that he is a handsome young man. When they arrive home, Sylvia and Nancy try to impress Richard much to the annoyance of Jane. At the Fourth of July dance, Jane and Richard dance together because Don is too busy working on his car. When it's time for Richard to leave, Jane organizes to take him to the station, but she takes Don's car instead because her car is being fixed by him. Jane is so frustrated at being labelled a "nice girl" she decides to set everyone straight. She secretly puts a potato in the exhaust pipe which slows down the car enough for Richard to miss his train. Jane then drives Richard all the way to New York in the rain. At the Calvert home, Jane gets out of her wet clothes and puts on a bright red outfit. Richard invites Jane to stay the night and she accepts. After drinking champagne, Jane starts to flirt with Richard, but all he does is tell her stories of his overseas expeditions. Richard shows Jane a wooden ring, but after she puts in on her finger it gets stuck. When Richard's mother phones, Jane overhears him telling her that Jane is just one of the Dana girls. It’s at that point that Jane realizes that she has made a fool of herself and drives all the way home. When she gets back in the early hours of the morning the car's horn goes crazy and everyone is alerted to her arrival. The town imagines a scandal which greatly upsets Jane. In order to stop the wild speculation, Nancy spreads the word that Jane and Richard are engaged. That night Jane is scheduled to sing at a Red Cross benefit. The conductor at the benefit, Hector Titus makes a public announcement that Jane is engaged. Don can't believe that his long term girlfriend has been lost to another man. When Richard suddenly appears at the benefit, Jane has to pretend that she is really engaged to him. In order to get out of an on-the-spot marriage, they fake a lover's quarrel and split-up in front of everyone. Meanwhile, Don has joined the military. Jane visits Don at the military base where he finally expresses his love for her.

Perhaps written by Andres de Segurola is the first song in NICE GIRL and beautifully performed by Jane Dana (Deanna Durbin):



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There was a legal dispute about the real origin of the melody. Did Franchetti get the idea from Heim or Dvorak??

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Don Webb (Robert Stack) tells Jane a "fascinating" story about the humble potato:



It would seem Don was more in love with his amazing car than with the sweet and beautiful Jane.

Notice Jane wearing a very distinctive brooch - a bird. It really stands out and certainly makes the audience wonder about the significance of wearing such a large piece of jewellery which has red, green, and gold jewels. Well, the brooch was given to Deanna by her mother, and proudly displayed to the movie public.

Richard Calvert (Franchot Tone) finds it difficult to finish a story of his adventures in Australia:



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Oliver Dana (Robert Benchley) and his family entertain Richard:

The Old Folks At Home written by Stephen Foster is very sweetly sung by Jane.



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Love At Last written by Jacques Press & Eddie Cherkose is beautifully sung by a love starved Jane.



But what did Richard have on his mind - nothing serious as it turned out to be.

Jane prefers champagne rather than milk.




Jane innocently puts on the wooden "wedding" ring that Richard places in front of her.

Beneath The Lights Of Home written by Bernie Grossman & Walter Jurmann is sung by a sweet looking Jane.



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Don tells Jane to ignore the gossip about her "engagement" to Richard.

Jane and Richard part on friendly terms.



In the movie, Don drives Jane up Red Coat Hill and stops next to a statue of an Indian. On the base of the statue is a plaque with the inscription: HERE WILD CLOUD, A YOUNG INDIAN BRAVE, LEAPED TO HIS DEATH WHEN HE LOST THE LOVE OF THE INDIAN MAID, SHY EYES. Near the end of the movie, Richard says "Bye Shy Eyes" to Jane, but Richard was never seen at the site of the statue, so how did he know about the legend? Could there of been a scene that was filmed of Richard and Jane at the site of the statue, but was later cut from the movie, or could it be just the director's way of keeping the audience guessing about Richard's feelings for Jane?

Jane arrives at the army base where Don finally expresses his feelings for her just before she is requested to sing:

Mistakes found in NICE GIRL:

The glasses that Hector Titus wears have no corrective effect.

In the opening sequence, Netty Peck jumps before she shrieks.

When the rabbits leap in distress at the sound of Oliver Dana singing, there are a few frames repeated.

Richard Calvert refers to his adventures with the pygmies in Australia, but there are no pygmies in Australia.

After Oliver Dana gives his speech at the Fourth of July party, he places his reading glasses in his top coat pocket, but the next camera shot shows his handkerchief in the pocket.

When Jane Dana drives back to Stillwater from New York after her failed night of romance with Richard Calvert, the car stops with its bonnet opposite the first section of white fencing. We then cut to a view of two outraged townspeople - then we cut back to the car – only it is still moving, and has only got as far as the driveway to Don Webb's garage.

MEMORABLE LINES:

Richard says to Jane, "We should have at least two lives - our own and a good one."

Deanna Durbin and Walter Brennan take a break from filming NICE GIRL:



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This is a photo of the happy Dana family:



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The original title of NICE GIRL was THE AMERICAN GIRL, but there were howls of protest from Deanna's British fans about the title obviously being too American, especially because Deanna has pure English blood!!

Here is a photo of Deanna's character getting wet for a scene in NICE GIRL:

NICE GIRL started production on 11/11/40. The first scene was completed at 11 am and there was 11 feet of film left in the camera!

Here is a photo of Deanna Durbin with Charles Previn and William Seiter:

Here is a NICE GIRL promotional photo of Jane and Richard at the site of the statue. The "Wild Cloud" plaque can be seen to the right. It's interesting to note that Richard is in a pose that suggests that he is going to leap and Jane seems to be trying to stop him. Now remember, this photo isn't part of the movie and notice the outfit Jane is wearing is also not seen in the movie:

REVIEW - PART ONE

This little old sleepy town?

An appreciation of Nice Girl? by George Timcke

Nice Girl? is my favourite of all the films, probably because it best displays what another reviewer has called Deanna’s ‘blend of wholesomeness with sexiness and a soupçon of intelligence’. In this film, sexiness is beginning subtly to grow into sexuality. There are numerous hints in the text, which is only appropriate, for Deanna was already nineteen before production finished and would be married before spring was out. In my opinion, Deanna, at this period of her life, was at her most lovely.

Someone else wrote that nothing much happens in the first half of the film, but that is fine by me. The high quality of the dialogue sustains our interest, and I enjoy seeing the healthy, happy family life of four people in a small town in New England. Professor Dana gently insists on a measure of discipline; so they eat together, and say grace beforehand, and every evening the girls brush their hair with fifty strokes, and do a few physical jerks and exercises in deportment and elocution. (Richard Calvert cheats at press-ups; his knees are on the floor.) But there is spontaneity in the Dana household, as when the Professor takes Nancy and Sylvia for a soda after Jane’s early-morning arrival has ‘not gone unnoticed’ – though perhaps he intended that the neighbourhood should see that they at least were unconcerned by the tittle-tattle – and there is humour in their dealings with each other. (Remember, ‘All jokes are funny.’)

There is a lot of humour in Nice Girl? as in most of Deanna’s films, but we have to distinguish between situational humour and the characters’ own sense of humour. For example, much of the humour in the film comes from Hector Titus, who is a wholly sympathetic character, but Hector himself has no discernible sense of humour. The girls’ sense of humour closely echoes their general demeanour. The elder girls are both a little solemn; Sylvia is more solemn than Jane, and Jane is more solemn than Nancy. To put it another way, Sylvia is solemn, Jane is a little earnest, and Nancy is a blithe spirit. Thus Sylvia, being rather a one-dimensional character, is given little chance to display any sense of humour at all. Jane, bless her, does not seem to have much of a sense of humour to display, only a tendency to sarcasm, as when her sisters query Richard’s age and she remarks, ‘I suppose they could tell from his teeth,’ and when she tells Richard at the dance that she had been dancing with Don, but ‘then he had carburator trouble.’ Of the three girls, only Nancy, given a superlative performance by a thirteen-year-old, has an active sense of humour, as when she cheats in the deportment exercise by putting an open book on her head.

The whole bedroom scene after singing round the piano is lovely. Jane is given some very good lines, and the last moments before she turns off the light are beautifully choreographed: Sylvia jumps over Jane’s feet in her flight stage right, and then Nancy does a quick sideways roll, ending the right way up on her side of the shared bed. Deanna, and presumably the others, are still wearing their daytime underwear, but one can see why the film-makers would have wanted it so.

The Professor too has a sense of humour, but in his case it generally takes the form of a mild self-deprecation that reinforces his believability as a character. The gradation of the girls’ solemnity is echoed by their different pet names for him: Sylvia calls him ‘father’, Jane ‘dad’, and Nancy ‘pop’. The Professor’s pet name for Sylvia is ‘Dozer’, it seems. (Later on, Sylvia, wanting to know about Richard, whom she and Nancy have not yet seen, asks, ‘What’s the old dozer like, Jane?’)

I can easily believe that this as a real family. It is a loving family; we sense not only the girls’ love for their father, and his for them, but their love for each other – though Nancy and Sylvia, it has to be said, are more overtly fond of Jane than she is of them; probably Jane is always thinking more of Don than of her sisters. Certainly Sylva and Nancy are closer to each other than either is to her. Poor Sylvia! Little (not so little) Nancy has boys around her like wasps round a jam jar, but for Sylvia there is no boyfriend apparent. Perhaps young men think she’s too tall; maybe she should wear flat shoes. Thank heaven she gets first chance to dance with Richard at the Boat Club dance. By the way, I wish I could understand her first words in the film: ‘Naiyun a knowun man.’ Clearly this is only a voice exercise, but voice exercises are commonly real words.

Like many a real family, the Dana family is not without its tensions – at all events, in one quarter. Another reviewer wrote that Nice Girl? answers its own question by starring ‘the relentlessly nice Deanna Durbin’. Well, as I write this I begin to have slight doubts about our Jane. In Nice Girl? Deanna is lovely, of course, and the Professor tells his middle daughter she is ‘the nicest girl in the world.’ But is he correct? Jane loves her dad, no question, but she can be pretty severe with both her sisters. She is in a constant state of mild exasperation with Don, not that we can blame her. And her treatment of Cora is more than a little peremptory, once or twice. She doesn’t say, ‘No, thank you’ when refusing potatoes; she just says ‘No.’ When going out to the car before taking Richard back to the station, she says, ‘Handkerchief, Cora,’ not ‘Handkerchief please, Cora.’ But none of us is perfect, and a little fallibility in Jane merely helps to round out her character.

Clearly Cora is not quite one of the family; still less has she taken the place of the absent Mrs Dana, though she has no compunction about forcibly removing Nancy’s lipstick as a mother might.

I am amused that, a little later, Jane has to ask where to look for a potato. (All the potatoes in the film look like russets, by the way). Clearly, unlike her sisters, Jane doesn’t help in the kitchen, and only prepares rabbit-food. I wonder what sort of housekeeper she will make for Don when they are married! But there is no doubt that she is fond of him. That is very clear from a delightful moment, totally understated, when Don breaks in on the family group that is sitting with Richard shortly after his arrival, almost hanging on his every word. Jane moves rapidly over to Don and for just an instant lays both hands gently on his arm. And they say that Deanna Durbin couldn’t act! If she only ever needed to glance at the script while she was having her hair done, before walking on to the set, that was acting.

Other favourite moments in the film are Jane’s look as she closes the bedroom door behind her, leaving her sisters burning with curiosity about Richard Calvert – perhaps it means ‘If you knew what I know!’ – and the moment during the Boat Club dance when Don is about to wipe his greasy hands on his white jacket and Jane says, ‘Ah‑ah‑ah!’ Another reviewer has said that ‘those who persist in believing that she “couldn’t act”’ should look out for that moment.

I also like the snort that Jane gives when she is comforted by her father and at last sees the funny side of the situation. Earlier she has said, ‘I’m human, Don,’ and human beings snort. I think it is in this second bedroom scene that we see the trademark rapid nod that appears somewhere in most of Deanna’s films. Another trademark appears in the barn scene: when the young Deanna has something important to say, she often does it with her head turned down and her eyes wide open, looking up from under her eyelashes. Given the beauty of her eyes, these are lovely moments. These little physical gestures are a continual source of delight, as when Deanna wrinkles her nose. She does that twice in this film: once in her own bedroom, when her sisters ask what Richard is like, and once in Richard’s own house, when she is choosing a hat. Notice how, in that scene, Jane towels her hair without disturbing the all-important curls at the front. Surely they got wet too, on the drive from Stillwater!

My favourite lines in the film are Jane’s ‘No one has thrown anything at anybody yet,’ and Hector’s ‘This it?’ as he whirls round with the ‘pastry tube’ (I’d call it a forcing bag). We know that Deanna had a good appetite, and we know (from That Certain Age) that she could play the piano with one hand while transmitting Morse code with the other, but I’d defy even Deanna to eat Cora’s charlotte russe while driving the shooting-brake to the station at Greenleaf! Or not without getting cream down her front.

I always enjoy seeing Deanna driving. The heavy old shooting-brake in this film will have given her no problem to drive, given her powerful arms and shoulders. I love that shooting-brake; it reminds me of one my parents had when I was small. It appears several times in the film, of course, but have you noticed it in the opening credits? It appears for a split second as Hector is crossing the road from the post office. It is standing still, with the back window open. Sadly, even using freeze-frame, I have been unable to tell who is in the driver’s seat, because the camera was panning at the time, and the titles get in the way. (Presumably it is Jane in the driver’s seat, for there is no evidence that Professor Dana ever drives these days.) I am morally certain that the very same shooting-brake, already a little battered, appears briefly in First Love, as Connie Harding’s train approaches the station near the school, towards the end of the film. It may even be the same one that appears for a moment, outside the cablegram office, in It’s A Date (where Anne Gwynne – uncredited – is on the telephone). For the life of me I cannot tell you the make of the shooting-brake, but I do know that it had a fixed-jet carburettor.

Dear me. What would the folks at Universal have thought, could they have known that, seventy years on, there would be people like me analysing their films (well, one of them) frame by frame!

The supporting cast is superb. Anne Gwynne (Sylvia) is given little chance to shine in this film, but she is competent and decorative. We know from Spring Parade that she could do a good job, and it is pleasant to think that she was among Deanna’s bridesmaids. Don is fine in the hands of Robert Stack. The Professor (Robert Benchley), Cora (Helen Broderick) and Hector (Walter Brennan) are sympathetic and totally believable characters. The affection that Cora really has for Hector, even though she calls him a boa constrictor, is rather touching. Franchot Tone, with his lopsided smile, is an effective foil for Deanna’s character. Ann Gillis’s portrayal of Nancy is a triumph.

Even the extras seem to have enjoyed themselves. Look at the old Irishman talking to Jane at the Boat Club dance. (He must have been Irish with a face like that, just as the actor James Finlayson, whom we see at the station talking to (or rather apostrophizing) Richard, is patently a Scot before he so much as opens his mouth.) And look at the wonderful old boy with glasses, wearing a frock coat and medals, dancing with his much shorter wife at the boathouse. He appears again at the Red Cross benefit concert. There it is that we see Cora for the last time – dressed, apparently, as a gypsy fortune-teller – but I have yet to find Netty anywhere other than at the beginning of the film.

By the way, how do we know (from IMDb) that Cora is Cora Foster and Netty is Netty Peck? No character is named either in the opening credits or at the end. IMDb gives us the names of an incredible forty-five actors, most of them uncredited, and fourteen of their characters have surnames. But IMDb does make one mistake: Don’s pet name for Jane is ‘Piggy’, not ‘Pinky’. It is difficult to hear the distinction, but we already have a Pinky Greene – that is quite clear when the Professor calls him ‘Stinky Bean’ to wind Nancy up – and there will not have been two Pinkys in the film even if there were two dozers.

REVIEW - PART TWO

This little old sleepy town?

An appreciation of Nice Girl? by George Timcke

The scenery, if not the set-dressing, is uneven. The view from the hilltop monument is clearly a painted backdrop. So is the night sky behind the boathouse, but that has been done beautifully, even if it does place the boathouse a good two miles outside the town, which makes rather a nonsense of the Professor’s injunction to Nancy’s two suitors to be off and go down to the boathouse for a swim. Perhaps they had bicycles. What, by the way, does Kenneth Atkins have on his head in that scene? It looks like nothing so much as a girl’s rubber swimming cap! (He is wearing it again on the morning of Jane’s return from New York.)

The boathouse itself must have been built around a tank, and I’ll not swear that the Indian canoes weren’t being hauled up and down on pieces of string. There are one or two oddities, such as Don’s tinkering with the car so many feet below where Jane is standing – below river level, presumably – and Hector’s lightning-quick translation from his place alongside Cora, watching the fireworks, to his place on the platform in front of the band. But the general setting, with the stars and the paper lanterns, is idyllic.

Much loving care was bestowed on the town sets. The opening scene behind the titles is wonderful, and the Danas’ house in particular is one of the stars of the show. Externally it only a somewhat undistinguished example of the Colonial clapboard style, and the interior is in places more than a little twee, but the general effect is charming. This is a comfortable family home, small but spacious, with high ceilings, big windows and several very good pieces of furniture. Cora keeps it looking like a new pin.

It is the joinery that most appeals to me: look at the doors, architraves, skirtings, chair-rails and panelling, the built-in furniture under the windows, the glass-fronted cabinets, the swing door into the kitchen, and the main staircase. It is all beautifully done. How strange, therefore, to see a wide crack in the kitchen door between the second rail and the bolection moulding around the panel nearest the hinge. (What a good idea to have a two-way door between the dining-room and the kitchen, by the way; Cora can back through it in either direction without having to put her tray down. We see the same thing in other films; perhaps it was common in American houses.)

Even the door furniture is lovely; the matching shaped door-plates contain the keyholes for the latches, and culminate in a magnificent mortise-lock-cum-Suffolk-latch on the inner front door. You will see precisely the same door-plates in First Love. I am afraid this is the engineer in me coming out. It will get worse.

I cannot list all the little touches of loving detail inside the house, but look at the kitchen. One recent reviewer wrote, ‘What I wouldn’t give for Cora’s kitchen!’ At first I was surprised to see an electric mixer there, but I believe that electric mixers had been available to the public since 1919. The mixer is typical of the set designers’ attention to detail, which even extends to the sounds of the house: listen for the twangy scraping sound of the spring on the screen door, and the piano that is beginning to need tuning. The sound of Jane galloping down the back stairs is just right. (I have noticed that, at least in the films up to this one, when Deanna is not either standing still or in bed she is very often running.)

Even the barn has its share of attention to detail. Look for the steam rising from the gas-fired swill boiler in the background, and the hanging spring balance that is used to weigh out the rabbit food. Look at the crab pots and so on that show that Stillwater cannot be very far from the sea. Look, indeed, at the white cat: can this be the same one as the poor, patient creature used in Lady On A Train? (Although generally torpid in that film – had it been sedated? – it was still very much alive, as we see when, set down at the bottom of the stairs, it immediately begins a much-needed scratch.)

I had got this far in my reactions to the Danas’ house when I began to wonder about its layout. Let us suppose that the set-designers had a ‘back story’ in mind. My theory is that the house we see from the street – we do not see it whole until about an hour in – is largely of timber on brick sleeper walls and has been built on to the front of an earlier, smaller house, of which the ground floor, at least, was built of stone and probably had a stone floor. If the fashion for raised timber verandas came later than the original house, that would explain both the steps up to the front door and the steps down into the dining-room, for the site is level enough. So far, so good. But the Professor’s study appears to be a single-storey extension built on to a corner of the original house. The kitchen may be part of the original house, but even it projects further back than the dining-room window. From the exterior shots there appears to be only one chimney stack (it appears in two scenes); but there ought to be at least two, because there is a fireplace in the Professor’s study and another in the dining-room, and the hood over the kitchen range must discharge somewhere (presumably into the same stack as the dining-room fireplace). When I observe that there are steps down from the kitchen into the garden, I begin to wonder whether I am losing my grip.

Upstairs, things are even more confusing. When Nancy, knowingly risking a spanking, goes into Sylvia’s room (newly vacated by Richard) and leans out of the window to blab to Don, it is clear that this room is at the front of the house; and it must be on the right as seen from the road, given the relative positions of Sylvia’s room and Jane and Nancy’s shared room, which have a communicating door. The shallow segmental arch over the bed that Jane and Nancy share for two nights presumably echoes the shape of the big window on the front elevation. Since their room has a window in the return wall opposite the communicating door, it must occupy the whole of the rest of the front of the house; perhaps it was the marital bedroom while Mrs Dana was alive and the girls were small. In that case, what is now Sylvia’s room would probably have been a dressing-room, though a dressing-room of no small size, for it too has windows in two walls. But then how did Sylvia get out on to the roof to do her vocal exercises? She must have gone through one of the back bedrooms, which must have a French door.

It is not a large house, but there I feel that there must have been a spare bedroom available for Richard, even allowing for Cora’s room and at least one bathroom, but it is of course essential to the story that the three girls shall share a room during Richard’s stay.

So far, the girls’ bedrooms still appear to be at the front of the house. The real problems start with the bedroom that the Professor now uses. We know from the scene of Jane’s return from New York that the newer, front part of the house is not very deep; probably it is only as deep as the girls’ bedrooms and possibly also the wide passage behind (the one with the round rug) – say, as deep as the sitting-room. So the Professor’s room must be in the old house. Now the street elevation of the new house (at the front) is wider than the old house; yet the Professor’s room, when seen from the upstairs passage, clearly extends beyond the corner of Sylvia’s bedroom. I cannot reconcile those facts.

The staircases, too, are a puzzle. Given the height of the ceilings, one half-landing (the one with the oriel window visible from outside) will have been sufficient for the main stairs, so there is only one right-angle bend in those stairs. Unless one invents some unnecessary passages and corners, that means that when Jane rushes up the main stairs after Cora has let her in, on ‘the morning after’, she emerges on to the upstairs passage running right-to-left as seen from the street. That puts the Professor’s bedroom at the front of the house, and the girls’ bedrooms on the left-hand side (as seen from the street), and that makes a nonsense of Nancy’s being able to lean out of the window to talk to Don, because Jane, approaching down the street from the right, has left the car short of the front door. It also destroys my theory that the arch over the shared bed echoes the shape of the big front window! What it does make possible is a French door in Sylvia’s own room, giving on to the balcony directly. But why would a dressing-room have a French door?

The back stairs need to be fitted in somehow, and I have yet to do it. They must communicate with the upstairs passage, since Jane uses either staircase at will. For a while I wondered whether the back stairs were originally the main staircase of the old house. I had to abandon that theory when I remembered that what remains of the old house (as seen from the street) has a style and scale that will have demanded something a bit more grand than the narrow back stairs now existing.

This is all quite unimportant, of course. It is only a film set, not a real house, as we see from the brickwork around the back steps outside the kitchen door (also with an external screen door – once again, what a good idea) and the grass behind the house, which appears to have been laid in strips (and I don’t mean turves). Film sets have a job to do, and I am the first to allow for the need to move the cameras around. But given the care lavished on this set, it is odd that the layout does not quite hang together, when the set designers have been so successful in other ways in creating something so generally solid and believable. I may yet be able to reconcile the conflicts and make it work as a whole. It occurs to me that, if I can make it work, and can draw it up, the house would be a very attractive subject for a doll’s house, for those who like that sort of thing.

The puzzles are not confined to the sets. I am sure that there must have been a cut scene with Jane and Richard by the monument at the top of the hill. Only that would explain the publicity still that Alex has given us, and Richard’s subsequent remark, ‘Goodbye, Shy Eyes.’ It can only have taken place on the morning before the Boat Club dance. It doesn’t seem very likely that Richard was about to leap in that posed shot; it is far more likely, given his sense of humour and lack of serious interest in Jane, that he had been joking. Jane, who has already begun to have the hots for him, will of course have been taking him seriously; so perhaps, in the publicity still, she was making some other appeal to him. Richard, of course, knows from the first what the unromantic Don really feels about Jane, having seen him looking at her devotedly during the song around the piano.

What a shame that cut scenes were not saved in those days. If something had to go, I’d rather have had another scene with Jane and Richard than the final scene at the barracks, which seems a little contrived – surely Don would have told Jane that he was joining up so very soon after the Red Cross benefit concert. (I must write out a timeline and see whether I can make it all fit.) The opportunity for Jane to sing is, frankly, gratuitous.

Richard is indirectly responsible for the infamous pyjamas. The name need not trouble us; people have obviously forgotten that, in the era when the film was made, the term was in common use for women’s costumes other than nightwear. (Remember ‘beach pyjamas’?) No; it’s their colour that puzzles me. I was ready to scoff at reviewers who seem not to have heard Nancy tell her father that the pyjamas are bright red; but if they were bright red, would they look so very black, even in a black-and-white film? Alex rightly draws our attention to a poster showing Deanna in red pyjamas, yet in one of the publicity stills he recently posted, she is wearing an identical turban and pyjamas but they are black! Possibly the ‘black’ still was taken during filming; there was a change of mind some way in to filming, to allow the ‘red’ photograph to be taken for the poster; Nancy’s line about the bright-red pyjamas was inserted to make the film match the poster; and the public was expected not to notice that it did not in fact match! Matters are complicated by the same costume’s appearing in green on a cigarette card of Deanna, though since it was patently hand-coloured, the pyjamas could easily have been made to appear almost any colour.

The film has made a very good transfer to DVD, but the soundtrack betrays a number of missing frames that even the meticulous Garry Armstrong does not mention in his review of the 19‑disc boxed set.

But these are cavils. Nice Girl? is a delightful film. ‘Often surprisingly racy for its time’, as another reviewer has written, the script is excellent, without a superfluous word. The quality of the music is uniformly high. For me, the songs that stand out are the specially written ones: the charming ‘Perhaps’, with Andrés de Segurola’s oddly non-rhyming lyric – such a clever idea to reveal only later that the music is coming from the radio, not from Jane’s imagination; the nostalgic ‘Beneath the Lights of Home’, which has some pleasant syncopations, at their clearest in the version with piano accompaniment; and the beautiful ‘Love at Last’, with that broad, graceful opening phrase in the refrain. The band begins with the refrain when it plays ‘Love at Last’ at the Boat Club dance, and no wonder. We have to wait until Jane reaches Richard’s house in New York before we understand the song’s significance in the film. It is in Richard’s house, too, that we are given perhaps the most beautifully photographed moment in the entire film, when Jane’s shadow moves fleetingly across the wall behind the landing as she decides to make for home. (Have you noticed? Almost all the Durbin films feature a curved staircase somewhere.) In Nice Girl? Deanna herself is superb. Another reviewer has said that she was never photographed more beautifully than in It’s a Date, but the dance scene here (at the boathouse) runs it a close second. Taken all in all, Nice Girl? is among Deanna’s very best.

George Timcke
Hersham, England
11 January 2009

This is a promotional shot of Deanna Durbin & Franchot Tone for the production of NICE GIRL:

Deanna Durbin and Robert Benchley check out their lines during the making of NICE GIRL:

Deanna Durbin & William Seiter having fun on the set of NICE GIRL:

Deanna Durbin & William Seiter enjoying refreshments during the production of NICE GIRL:

Deanna's sister, had a baby, so the film crew called her "Aunty Deanna" on the set of NICE GIRL:

Deanna Durbin is looking stunning in this promotional photo for NICE GIRL:

In NICE GIRL, Universal Studios had three different Deanna Durbin song endings recorded:



For Great Britain - There'll Always Be An England written by Charles Parker.

For the United States - Thank You America written by Bernie Grossman & Walter Jurmann.

For Latin America - Thank You America performed in the Spanish language.

This is the 1940 trailer for NICE GIRL: