Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day Sixty-One: Girls Just Wanna Get Married

At the start of the film Four Daughters, Claude Rains is on the piano while his four on screen daughters are playing various instruments and singing. For a moment what I thought I was going to get was a light-hearted musical romp as Rains chastises the girls for not getting into classical music and instead blowing bubble-gum and reading romance magazines. But instead of being independent all of the girls want to be married especially eldest sister Emma, played by Gale Page the only one of the Four Daughters not portrayed by the real life Lane sisters, who wants romance and a knight in shining armour. As the film rolls on each girl apart from Kay gets a suitor, Thea's suitor is the much older Ben while Emma starts to get interested in a man named Ernest. Then composer Felix Deitz comes around catching Emma's eye but instead romancing younger sister Ann. However the film's most interesting character is the wise-cracking cynical composer Mickey Borden who starts to fall for Ann and convinces her that Emma is in love with Felix. On Ann and Felix's wedding day she runs off and marries Mickey and we see their life isn't as happy as either would think. Returning on Christmas Ann and Mickey find that Emma and Ernest are together and that Kay has gone off to London to sing on the radio. Mickey drives Felix to the station and on the way back gets into an accident and later passes away but at the end of the film we get the impression that Felix and Ann will get together once again.

If the plot sounds a little melodramatic then that's because this film was totally over the top. I think the one problem I had with it was that it couldn't really decide what it wanted to be first of all it was a bit musical and light-hearted with the girls talking about boys a lot and various suitors popping up but towards the end it all started to get a little serious with Ann and Mickey getting into debt and then him dying in a car accident. But the main problem was that I just didn't connect with any of the characters and the Lane sisters acting wasn't up to much. There were some good performances from the supporting players especially from Claude Rains as the girl's father and May Robson as their aunt. The best character of all though was Mickey and he was ably played by John Garfield, who was nominated as Best Supporting Actor. However I feel that this film was just something that Michael Curtiz did to fill his time between making the much more well-known The Adventures of Robin Hood and Angels with Dirty Faces.