SEVEN SWEETHEARTS
US, 1942, 98 minutes. Black and white.
Kathryn Grayson, Marsha Hunt, Cecilia Parker, Peggy Moran, Van Heflin, S.Z. Sakall, Louise Beavers, Isobel Elsom.
Directed by Frank Borzage.
Seven Sweethearts is not a film that many people would sit through comfortably these days. Even in its time, at the outbreak of American involvement in World War Two, the film may have seemed too much of a fantasy.
The setting is Delft, Michigan, a Dutch town which has retained the look, the manners, the tulips of Holland. At this stage, Holland had been invaded by the Nazis and was occupied. The setting for this town is in stark contrast to the Dutch experience of the period.
A hard-nosed journalist, played by Van Heflin (who this year won an Oscar for best supporting actor in Johnny Eager), arrives in the town and is dismayed to find how Dutch it is. He encounters an old man playing in the marketplace with many others echoing his music with instruments. It appears that he is the patriarch of the town, the owner of the hotel, the father of seven daughters.
The daughters are all attractive – except for Marsha Hunt, the icy older sister who wants to be an actress in New York. The tradition is that the oldest daughter must marry and then the other daughters can follow suit. However, the older daughter is not married, the others all have boyfriends except for the youngest, played by Kathryn Grayson. The journalist is set up with the older daughter but, listening to the youngest daughter’s singing, he falls in love with her. There are various battle of the sexes scenes between the two before a happy resolution.
All the daughters have boys’ names – the father naming them before they were born, hence having to keep the boys’ names. Some suggest that there is some kind of Freudian question mark about this screenplay device.
Everybody is charming in the town, the daughters all work for their father in the hotel, there are a variety of guests. There is a stern elderly woman who has been there for fifteen years, played by Isobel Elsom.
Kathryn Grayson gets the opportunity to do a lot of singing in her operatic style. She was twenty when she made this film. She was soon to emerge as one of MGM’s major singing stars in Anchors Aweigh and was the star of Show Boat and Lovely To Look At.
The dialogue is rather twee, the situation quite artificial, a fairy tale in the trappings of America of 1942. Audiences will find this rather hard to sit through, given the pace, the style and the screenplays of subsequent decades.
The film was directed by veteran Frank Borzage who had been directing films since 1913. His films include Street Angel, Seventh Heaven, A Farewell to Arms, Three Comrades and The Mortal Storm.
