100 Men & a Girl (Universal). Year ago when Universal Pictures Corp. was on bankruptcy's brink, "Uncle Carl" Laemmle sold it to a group of Manhattan bankers headed by John Cheever Cowdin, who knew as much about the cinema as "Uncle Carl" knew about banking. But their first production, Three Smart Girls (TIME, Dec. 21), was a box-ofifice hit, introducing Deanna Durbin, most promising cinema songstress in years. Last week in her second picture, her first starring role, Songstress Durbin underlined the fact that in her Universal had found its most valuable property and an A-1 box-office attraction.
Audiences like Deanna Durbin for her negative virtues almost as much as for her positive good points. Negatively, she pleases by her lack of the arch, smarty, claphands affectations which have blighted so many Hollywood juveniles in the bud. Positively, she has a clear, appealing soprano, a plump and pleasant face, a buxom 14-year-old physique. In 100 Men & a Girl, as the daughter of an impoverished trombonist (Adolphe Menjou) who is trying vainly to get a job in Stokowski's orchestra, Miss Durbin finds her way without pathetic bumbles through some pretty sentimental sequences. She collects an orchestra of 100 out-of-work musicians, friends of her father's, finally prevails on Stokowski himself (in person) to conduct her 100-man orchestra in a grand finale concert.
Co-Star Leopold Stokowski makes a somewhat wooden actor when he is caught off his podium, but with his feet on their accustomed ground he gives a spirited imitation of Stokowski facing the music. That it is an imitation is largely owing to the technical complications involved in the making of musical films. The orchestral music in 100 Men & a Girl was actually played in Philadelphia by Stokowski's Philadelphia Orchestra, recorded in eight sound tracks instead of the usual one. The orchestra men who appear on the screen are simply Hollywood musicians going through the motions, with Stokowski presiding majestically over the vacuum. Deanna Durbin went East to record her songs before a single scene had been shot on the Universal lot.
Apparently still unspoilt, Deanna Durbin offstage has the normal 14-year-old girl's fondness for intolerant sentiments, for primly precocious phraseology. She has announced that she will "probably never marry." Asked whether she would like Clark Gable as her leading man. she replied: "Why, I admire Mr. Gable's acting very much, but I believe the choice of a leading man depends on whether or not he is suitable for the role."
Mayerling (Nero Film) takes its title from the Austrian hunting lodge where on a cold morning of January 1889, the heir to the Habsburg dynasty was found shot with his young and tolerably beautiful mistress, the Baroness Marie Vetsera. All those within scrutiny were sworn to life secrecy by the Emperor Franz Joseph, who issued the fiat that the pair had committed double suicide, and the incident was the subject of an official dossier inflammable enough to be excluded finally from the State archives. In the less combustible medium of celluloid, the Mayerling mystery is simplified into a classic denouement to a beautiful friendship.