Four Daughters movie storyline. Fannie Hurst’s Sister Act was the source for this money-making Warners weeper. The four daughters of the title are played by the Lane Sisters–Priscilla, Rosemary and Lola–and by Gale Page. All are musical prodigies, and all are daughters of master-musician Claude Rains. To help make ends meet, Rains rents several rooms of his home to boarders–most of whom, thanks to the dictates of the plot, seem to be marriageable men.
We’re supposed to care the most about the mutual attraction the daughters feel towards handsome Jeffrey Lynn, but the film really belongs to John Garfield, making his movie debut (no, he wasn’t in 1933’s Footlight Parade) as an embittered piano genius. Garfield has us in the palm of his scruffy hand the moment he begins philosophizing about “the fates:” “So they flipped a coin… heads he’s poor, tails he’s rich… they flipped a coin–with two heads.”
Aware that he can bring only unhappiness to Priscilla Lane, the daughter who cares most for him, Garfield obligingly drives into a heavy snowstorm and is killed in an auto accident (but it’s not staged as a suicide, lest the Hays Office spank). John Garfield made so powerful an impression in Four Daughters that Warners was compelled to write him into the sequel Four Wives, first as a flashback and then as (implicitly) a ghost. Another film, Daughters Courageous, was hastily constructed using the same cast, but with different character names so as to accommodate a happier denouement for Garfield and Lane.
Four Daughters is a 1938 American musical drama film that tells the story of a happy musical family whose lives and loves are disrupted by the arrival of a cynical young composer who interjects himself into the daughters’ romantic lives. The movie stars the Lane Sisters (Priscilla Lane, Rosemary Lane, and Lola Lane) and Gale Page, and features Claude Rains, Jeffrey Lynn, John Garfield, and Dick Foran. The three Lanes were sisters and members of a family singing trio.
The film was written by Lenore J. Coffee and Julius J. Epstein, adapted from the 1937 Fannie Hurst story “Sister Act”, and was directed by Michael Curtiz. The movie’s success led to two sequels with more or less the same cast: Four Wives and Four Mothers.
Four Daughters is the first in a series of four films by Warner Bros. featuring the Lane Sisters and the other cast members. It was followed by 1939’s Daughters Courageous, also directed by Michael Curtiz and co-starring Claude Rains and John Garfield, though it is a story about a different family. However, the storyline of Four Daughters and the Lemp family is continued in the 1940 film, Four Wives, and 1941’s Four Mothers. Four Daughters was remade in 1954 as Young at Heart starring Frank Sinatra and Doris Day.
Four Daughters (1938)
Directed by: Michael Curtiz
Starring: Priscilla Lane, John Garfield, Rosemary Lane, Jeffrey Lynn, Lola Lane, May Robson, Gale Page, Frank McHugh, Claude Rains, Dick Foran, Vera Lewis, Tom Dugan, John Garfield
Screenplay by: Lawrence Kimble, Thyra Samter Winslow
Production Design by: Al Alleborn
Cinematography by: Ernest Haller
Film Editing by: Ralph Dawson
Costume Design by: Orry-Kelly
Art Direction by: John Hughes
Music by: Max Steiner
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
Release Date: August 9, 1938 (USA)
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