To the extent that I'll Be Yours succeeds the credit goes to Preston Sturges and Deanna Durbin. The movie is written by Felix Jackson, who "adapted" it from Sturges's script for William Wyler's The Good Fairy (1935) based on a play by Ferenc Molar. Deanna Durbin plays Louis Ginglebusher (played by Margaret Sullavan in Wyler's film) and sings, beautifully, four songs -- Sari Waltz, Granada, Brahm's Lullaby and It's Dream Time -- that convey what the script fails to do, mainly maturity and passion, as Universal tries to keep Durbin the young girl that they think her fans want to her to be. Seiter's direction is plodding and only comes alive with Durbin and Adolph Menjou as her manipulative suitor (Jack Webb to William Holden in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, "Where did you get that suit, Adolph Menjou?"); Durbin ends up with Tom Drake, the "boy next door" from Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
There's little in Seiter's career to suggest he knew or cared much about either music or comedy; he directed the poorest Mark Brothers movie (Room Service, 1938) and the worst Astaire/Roberts film --Roberta in 1938 -- which is saved by Irene Dunne's singing, just as I'll Be Yours is saved by Durbin's lovely soprano. When Universal continued to give Durbin's films low budgets, mediocre scripts and directors and juvenile roles (with the one glowing exception of Robert Siodmak's Christmas Holiday in 1944 that was little appreciated when it came out) she quit movies in 1948 at the age of twenty-seven and lived happily with her husband, Charles David, in France until his death in 1999 and her death in 2013.
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