Amazon.com: Despite its Larry Flynt-friendly title, Deanna Durbin is typically wholesome in the lavishly produced musical One Hundred Men and a Girl, which finds its heroine saving a fledgling orchestra led by financially challenged father Adolph Menjou, along with help from Leopold Stokowski. Not surprisingly, music is literally center stage for much of this delightful film; highlights include Stoki's batonless conducting of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony and Deanna's winsome trilling of Mozart's 'Alleluia.' The resulting package earned its star a special 1938 Academy Award (for her 'spirit and personification of youth') and took home an Oscar of its own for Charles Previn's score. --Steven Smith
Digital Life Reviews
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - A great Classic
I first saw this movie on TMC and didn't expect it to be such a good movie, but wow! this is a sleeper. I ams so glad I was able to find it again and at such a reasonable price.
Rating: - Daughter to the Rescue
I decided to watch this movie because I saw it won an Oscar for Best Writing (or something like that). It is a Depression Era movie that tells of an unemployed trombone player (supposedly unemployed for 2 years!). Anyway, circumstances lead his teenage daughter to approach an eccentric socialite woman about sponsoring a band of unemployed musicians (father was not alone in the musical unemployment lines). Through a bunch of mildly amusing twists, things gradually develop.
This movie features a conductor by the name of Stokowski (it kept sounding like Tschaichovsky). I assumed that he, too, was a fictional character. However, I saw him listed on the credits as himself so he must have been somebody back then. I thought the movie was OK but nothing too special. I note from other reviews that Deanna Durbin was a popular figure. She sang in an operatic style. I got a kick out of the conductor asking ... Read More
Rating: - Okey Dokey, Stokie!
The "One Hundred Men and a Girl" of the title are, respectively, the unemployed musicians who form a symphony orchestra in the hope of finding a sponsor and the plucky flibbertigibbet who, through her guileless charm and moxie, brings them together with Leopold Stokowski. It's all incredibly far-fetched and corny, but it's an extremely likeable picture. It is notable for the respect it pays to classical music: in "One Hundred Men and a Girl," music actually matters; the out-of-work musicians are heroic figures who retain their nobility despite the holes in their shoes, the shine on their suits and the stains on their hats; the audiences who attend classical music concerts in this picture listen with rapt attention and respond enthusiastically at the end; when broadcasting plutocrat Eugene Pallette falls asleep at a concert (he's the only character in the entire movie who does), the joke is on him, rather than on the ... Read More
Rating: - Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark
A consortium of business types gathers in a Manhattan penthouse and sneers at the little people, a slightly overdrawn look at capitalism. These guys are so awful they make the capitalists in a Lars Von Trier film like MANDERLAY or DOGVILLE look like Albert Schweitzers. The fattest cat is John R. Frost, played by Eugene Pallette in an extremely broad mode, almost as though he were Tony Soprano as a hillbilly. He makes an unlikely financier!
Deanna Durbin has a tough part here, she's always in center stage but most of the time she just has to bug Stokowski until he finally relents, and you can sympathize with him, for she takes what we now call "stalking" to new lows. The two of them are equally good at acting, and Stokowski in particular is a surprise. He could have been a major screen actor on the model of, say, Claude Rains. His huge mop of white hair alone commands attention, and he speaks beautifully, ... Read More
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- A great Classic
- Daughter to the Rescue
- Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark
