It Started with Eve

Movie Review: It Started with Eve

Year of Release: 1941
Country of Origin: USA
Director: Henry Koster
Cast: Deanna Durbin, Charles Laughton, Robert Cummings

Plot outline: A young man asks a hat check girl to pose as his fiancee in order to make his dying father's last moments happy. However, the old man's health takes a turn for the better and now he doesn't know how to break the news that he's engaged to someone else, especially since his father is so taken with the impostor (IMDb).

Deanna Durbin had a beautiful singing voice and was an accomplished pianist. That may have been what drew the audiences of the day to her movies, but what makes It Started with Eve entertaining isn't the music, which is secondary, but the side-splitting comic situations the characters find themselves in. The characters are real, not actors in a comedy punctuating comic moments. For example, when Durbin and the scene-stealing Charles Laughton sit at a table in a nightclub and laugh themselves silly over something amusing that happens involving a lambchop. A lesser comedy would have played the gag straight-faced, evoked the requisite laughs, and moved on. Here, the characters laugh with the audience, elaborating on the silly hilarity of the gag with short phrases spat out between guffaws. In addition, there's more substance to the movie than the usual situational comedy. Mixed in are some engrossing emotional moments - and unlike many comedies that do this awkwardly, these are neither gratuitous nor disruptive to the movie's flow. (AAG)

My judgement: *** out of 4 stars