Deanna Durbin Sweetheart Pack - It Started with Eve (1941) Xvid 1cd - Charles Laughton [DDR]

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2014.04.27

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Deanna Durbin Sweetheart Pack - It Started with Eve (1941) Xvid 1cd - Charles Laughton [DDR]

It Started with Eve is a 1941 musical romantic comedy film directed by Henry Koster and starring Deanna Durbin, Robert Cummings, and Charles Laughton. Based on a story by Hanns Kräly, the film is about a man whose dying father wants to meet his son's new fiancée, but she is unavailable, so he substitutes a hatcheck girl. Complications arise when the father unexpectedly recovers. The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Music Score (Charles Previn and Hans J. Salter). The film is considered by some critics to be Durbin's best film, and the last in which she worked with the producer (Joe Pasternak) and director (Henry Koster) that groomed her for stardom. It Started with Eve was remade in 1964 as I'd Rather Be Rich.

CAST:-
Deanna Durbin as Anne Terry
Charles Laughton as Jonathan Reynolds
Robert Cummings as Jonathan 'Johnny' Reynolds Jr.
Guy Kibbee as Bishop Maxwell
Margaret Tallichet as Gloria Pennington
Catherine Doucet as Mrs. Pennington
Walter Catlett as Doctor Harvey
Charles Coleman as Roberts
Leonard Elliott as Reverend Henry Stebbins
Irving Bacon as Raven
Gus Schilling as Raven
Wade Boteler as Harry, the Newspaper Editor
Dorothea Kent as Jackie Donovan
Clara Blandick as Nurse

Directed by Henry Koster
Produced by Joe Pasternak
Music by Hans J. Salter
Running time 90 minutes

MOVIE REVIEW:- It Started With Eve (1941)
It Started with Eve (1941) was the last of the musical comedy films Deanna Durbin made for Universal Studios under the guidance of the two men who had groomed her for stardom, producer Joe Pasternak and director Henry Koster. The series, which began with Three Smart Girls in 1936, was so successful that it turned Durbin into a box-office sensation and literally saved Universal from bankruptcy. Many Durbin aficionados consider It Started with Eve to be the best of her film vehicles - and certainly the funniest, with a brightly amusing script and sparkling support from two of Durbin's favorite and most compatible costars, Charles Laughton and Robert Cummings.

Durbin plays Anne Terry, a struggling singer who works as a hatcheck girl and is persuaded by young business tycoon Johnny Reynolds (Cummings) to pretend to be his fiancée to please his father, Jonathan Reynolds, Sr. (Laughton), who is thought to be fatally ill. Comic complications ensue when the senior Reynolds regains his health and Johnny's real fiancée, gold-digger Gloria Pennington (Margaret Tallichet) protests the ruse. The expert supporting cast includes Clara Blandick (Auntie Em from The Wizard of Oz, 1939) as an overly attentive nurse, Walter Catlett as a physician with symptoms of his own and Leon Belasco as a couturier who prematurely provides Gloria with fashionable mourning clothes.

According to a magazine article of the time, Durbin was earning approximately $5,000 per week during this period, including royalties from various recordings and merchandise (dolls, clothing articles, fictional stories, etc.), with an additional $100,000 bonus each year "upon the completion of her two obligatory films." She would continue in films through 1948, but It Started with Eve marked the peak of her career as a singing ingénue. After Pasternak and Koster had moved on to other studios, her career at Universal would lose much of its luster as the studio struggled to find suitable vehicles for its maturing star. None of them would match the prestige and appeal of her Pasternak/Koster movies; it was generally considered that the poor quality of some of her later films led to her retirement.

Laughton, to look convincing as a man hovering near death, lost 40 pounds before filming began and wore oversized clothes and special makeup to make him look even gaunter; he is all but unrecognizable. The early scene on his supposed deathbed allows him to show his acting chops and gain audience sympathy, and the fact that the Cummings character is attached to someone else (for a time) allows Durbin to turn her sympathetic attention to the older man in many scenes. The Durbin/Laughton combo generates an onscreen rapport that gives particular warmth to their encounters. Their chemistry proved so potent that they would make a second film together, Because of Him (1946). The two also enjoyed each other off-camera; Durbin referred to Laughton in interviews as a "special friend" among her costars, and that friendship continued until his death in 1962.

Durbin and Cummings had become chums while costarring in two earlier films, Three Smart Girls Grow Up (1939) and Spring Parade (1940). They also saw each other socially and enjoyed a lighthearted, teasing relationship. Durbin had just married Vaughn Paul, an assistant director on some of her early films, and during filming of It Started with Eve the newlyweds spent a weekend at the home of Cummings and his wife, Vivien. On the set the following Monday, Durbin complained that she was so sore from all the laughter that she couldn't sing properly. Cummings was on quite a busy schedule, filming Kings Row (1942) at Warner Bros. simultaneously with It Started with Eve.

Durbin and Cummings, sometimes to the annoyance of director Koster, mischievously tried to break each other up in their more serious scenes. When playing opposite each other in profile, both did distracting things with the off-camera sides of their faces. Cummings would look only into Durbin's left eye, leading her to burst into giggles and exclaim, "I can't stand the way he looks at me. It makes me feel one-sided!" She, in turn, would regard him tenderly with one side of her face while the other, unseen by the camera, would distort into grotesque grimaces and smirks. The playfulness enlivened their more lighthearted scenes, such as a romantic encounter when, to cool his ardor, she bites his ear.

Musical highlights include a funny conga by Durbin and Laughton and, of course, Deanna's singing. She performs When I Sing from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty; Goin' Home from Dvorak's From the New World; and, notably, a lightning-fast Clavelitos (at a reported 157 words per minute, in Spanish!) by Albert Hay Malotte, while accompanying herself on the piano. Also at the piano, she performs an excerpt from Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1.

It Started with Eve opened in New York City on October 2, 1941, the only one of Durbin's movies to premiere at Radio City Music Hall. The film, another box-office winner for Durbin, received positive reviews; in The New York Times Bosley Crowther called it "light and unpretentious fare" that "should please - as they say - both young and old. It's the perfect '8-to-80' picture." He went on to praise director Koster for getting "the best out of Mr. Laughton, that man of great reknown... Mr. Laughton plays with flavor, mischief, humor and great inventiveness." Crowther also noted that "Miss Durbin is as refreshing and pretty as she has ever been and sings...with lively charm."

It Started with Eve, originally titled Almost an Angel, received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Music Score (Charles Previn and Hans J. Salter). It was remade by Universal in 1964 as I'd Rather Be Rich, with the genders of the romantic leads switched. Robert Goulet played a variation of the Durbin role, with Sandra Dee in the Cummings part and Maurice Chevalier as the dying grandfather. Before that, Laughton had repeated his role in two radio adaptations of the movie, one by Lux Radio Theater in November 1944 and the other by Screen Guild Theater in April 1950.



TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS:-
Video Codec: XviD ISO MPEG-4
Video Bitrate: 855 kbps
Video Resolution: 640x480
Video Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1
Frames Per Second: 23.976
Audio Codec: 0x2000 (Dolby AC3) AC3
Audio Bitrate: 192kb/s CBR 48000 Hz
Audio Streams: 2
Audio Languages: English
RunTime 90 mins
Subtitles: None
Ripped by: Trinidad [DDR]
Duration: 90 mins