The first volume in Kino Lorber's Deanna Durbin reissue series provides an excellent showcase for the Canadian-American actress, one of Universal's top stars. All three feature her frequent collaborators, producer Boris Pasternak and director Henry Koster (The Bishop's Wife). Leopold Stokowski, the flamboyant conductor from Disney's Fantasia, also shows up in two films. Though they aren't musicals in the conventional sense, the classically-trained Durbin sings in each of them. In best picture nominee and Winston Churchill favorite One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937), 15-year-old Durbin took on her first leading role as Patsy Cardwell, a good-hearted kid who just wants the best for her trombone player father (Adolphe Menjou, The Front Page) and his unemployed musician friends. After the widower strikes out in his attempt to talk to Stokowski about a job, he finds a purse filled with cash, and uses it to pay their overdue rent. Patsy finds the socialite owner of the purse (Alice Brady, Dinner at Eight), returns it, and tells her the truth. Charmed by Patsy's honesty and operatic singing, Mrs. Frost lets her keep the money and encourages her to start her own orchestra, and that's what she does. By the end, she's even convinced Stokowski to serve as their conductor. Patsy's pluck and the film's sympathy for the working class made it a box office hit. Though over-amped and high-pitched, she was already a gifted physical comedienne with a robust singing voice. Three Smart Girls Grow Up (1939), the follow-up to Three Smart Girls (1936), reunites Durbin with Nan Grey as Joan, while Helen Parrish replaces Barbara Read as Kay. The wisp of a plot recalls Jane Austen's Emma as Penny Craig attempts to orchestrate her sisters' love lives, causing comical havoc, before things end up working out exactly as she had intended. Durbin doesn't just look more sophisticated, but shows considerable growth as an actress, since she dropped the high pitch and developed screwball timing to give Rosalind Russell a run for the money (a third film in the Three Smart Girls trilogy, Hers to Hold, saw release in 1943). Fellow Universal contract player and comic foil Robert Cummings, the object of Kay's affection in the previous film, returns in It Started with Eve (1941) as Johnny, a wealthy young man desperate for his deathly ill father, Jonathan (a shamelessly mugging Charles Laughton), to meet his fiancée. When he can't locate her in time, he pays Durbin's Anne Terry, a quick-witted hat-check girl, to fill in for her. The aspiring singer charms the cigar-chomping Jonathan so thoroughly that he starts to improve, which puts Johnny in an amusingly awkward predicament. True love wins out in the end, though the film posits that the truest love, in a Platonic sense, lies between the father and his future daughter-in-law. Durbin has no trouble holding her own against an unhinged Laughton, particularly in a Marx Brothers-like nightclub sequence. Film historians Stephen Vagg and Samm Deighan provide the context-rich commentary tracks. Highly recommended. (K. Fennessy)