On Thursday, the Heights Theater in Columbia Heights screens a delightful vintage classical music movie that’s been unavailable in cinemas for decades — until now: 100 Men and a Girl. Deanna Durbin plays Patsy, the daughter of a down-and-out trombone player, John Cardwell (Adolphe Menjou). John lies to Patsy that he's got a job with top conductor Leopold Stokowski (who plays himself). When Patsy finds out the truth, she's far from disappointed — instead, she cooks up a plan to land work for the 100 musicians and is determined to convince Stokowski to take them on.
It’s amazing that Durbin was only 16 when she made the film. By the time she was 25, she was the second highest-paid woman in America, just behind Bette Davis. Durbin was making the equivalent of $4.5 million in today’s dollars, a box office draw that saved Universal Pictures from bankruptcy. And yet, within two years she retired, moved to France and disappeared from public view. It was quite a vanishing act for a woman who was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. She was such a gifted singer that the Metropolitan Opera was following her career. The Met would never have allowed a soprano to sing Puccini's famous tenor aria "Nessun Dorma," but Hollywood did!
Also opening Thursday, the movie of the Pulitzer-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See. It’s the World War II story of Marie-Laure Leblanc, a blind French girl taking refuge with her uncle, and Werner Pfennig, a brilliant German teenager with an expertise in radio repair. Through a shared secret connection, they find faith in humanity and the possibility of hope. Music plays a role, too, and if the trailer is any indication, we’ll see an uptick in sales of Debussy’s Claire de Lune!
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