美凤夺鸾

There isn’t enough goodwill in Henry Koster’s drawing-room comedy, IT STARTED WITH EVE, a high-fidelity divertissement from Tinseltown’s propaganda mill. The elderly, moribund multi-millionaire Jonathan Reynolds is miraculously recovered and transubstantiated into a bouncy matchmaker after meeting Anne Terry (Durbin), the fiancée of his filial son Johnny (Cummings). But the truth is, Anne is just a cloakroom girl who has aptitude of singing.

When he is unable to locate his fiancée Gloria (Tallichet), and being convinced by the family doctor Harvey (Catlett) that Jonathan is in extremis, Johnny carelessly thinks it is just a one-time deal and in a pinch he hires Anne to pretend to be Gloria, whereupon this white lie flourishes in the usual mixture of miscomprehension and farce. Anne cannot let go of a life-time opportunity to get recognized for her exceptional soprano timbre, whereas Johnny must juggle between appeasing a piqued Gloria and pondering an apposite time to spill the beans to Jonathan, but when the latter finds out the truth, he has his own little scheme to play.

It is tempting to conjecture that a May-December romance is in the pipeline, and a spry Laughton is only 42 years old, it is his beady eyes with a telling slyness that betrays the young-at-heart player under the laborious maquillage that transforms him into a decrepit patient. But under the watchful eye of the Hays Code, such age inappropriate affair is quite unethical (though in real life, it is quite hard-wired, Hollywood especially), thus, all Jonathan can do is to play cupid and keep Anne in the family, although the over-obedient and pinch-happy Johnny makes a less jarring pair with a sulky Gloria than a high-spirited, corn-fed Anne, and songbird-cum-child-star Durbin enters the phase of adulthood with a felicitous aroma of glamor and tendress.

Anodyne and exceptionally entertaining notwithstanding, IT STARTED WITH EVE’s appeal begins to pall when the stakes dissipate, but it doesn’t take long before it reaches a swiftdenouement, at least director Koster knows how to wind things up neatly for its own good!

referential entries: Koster’s THE BISHOP’S WIFE (1947, 7.3/10); George Seaton’s MIRACLE ON THE 34TH STREET (1947, 7.9/10).