Irving Pichel's Something in the Wind (1947), with Deanna Durbin

Why did audiences embrace Durbin?  She's that American icon -- the problem solver, the little underdog winner, the individual whose determination changes things to the way she wants them to be.
--Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine (Knopf, 2007)

How and why did Deanna Durbin go from one of the most popular stars of the forties to being almost completely forgotten today?  When I took a course recently on the American musical her name was not even mentioned.  Tastes change and Durbin was a feisty woman with a beautiful soprano who started in movies as a teenager, made twenty-three films in twelve years, made her last movie in 1948 at the age of twenty-seven, moved to France and died in relative obscurity in 2013.  She married the director, Charles David, of one of her last movies, Lady on a Train (1947), a movie, along with Christmas Holiday (Robert Siodmak, 1943) and Something in the Wind that established her as an adult, something audiences didn't seem to want, after years of mediocre films produced by Joseph Pasternak and directed by Henry Koster, where she was mostly a teenager.

Something in the Wind is a charming and somewhat goofy movie, from Donald O'Connor doing an acrobatic dance to "I Love a Mystery"  (choreography by Eugene Loring, song by Johnny Green and Leo Robin) to Durbin and Metropolitan Opera star Jan Peerce singing the duet "Misere" from Verdi's Il Trovatore as Durbin tries to pick Peerce's pocket for the key that can get her out of jail.  Durbin plays a young disc jockey whom John Dall (Rope, 1948) tries to buy off from revealing her affair with Dall's recently deceased grandfather (it was actually Durbin's aunt with the same name).  There is much intrigue and misunderstanding, as Dall loses his interest in his fiancé Clarissa (Helena Carter) and falls for Durbin.  There is a fashion show --not unusual for films in the forties -- a kidnapping and even an affectionate spoof of ballet at the end. Pichel -- a good journeyman director of Westerns and melodramas -- keeps this all under reasonable control as Durbin uses up all the space around her and sings beautifully.

I recommend Basinger's chapter on Durbin, detailing how Universal used her as a cash cow until she got fed up with the low budgets and the constant disregard of her opinions on directors, etc. She married David and retired to France.