Main Cast: Claude Rains, May Robson, Priscilla Lane, Lola Lane, Rosemary Lane
Release Year: 1938
Country: US
Run Time: 90 minutes
Plot
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 was remade in 1954 as Young at Heart, with Frank Sinatra and Doris Day in the John Garfield and Priscilla Lane roles. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Four Daughters is a 1938musicaldrama 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. It stars the Lane Sisters plus Gale Page, Claude Rains, Jeffrey Lynn, John Garfield and Dick Foran. The Lanes were real sisters, members of a family singing trio.
The Lemp sisters, Ann, Kay, Thea and Emma, are prodigies in a musical family headed by their father, Adam. The Lemps also run a boarding house, and among the tenants is Felix Deitz, a young composer whom the four daughters aim to attract. Emma, the oldest daughter, is the object of affection for a nervous neighbor, Ernest, but she rebuffs his attentions. Thea, a pianist and the second oldest, is courted by a local wealthy man, Ben Crowley, but is not sure she loves him. Kay, the next oldest, is a talented singer and has a chance at a music school scholarship, but doesn't want to leave home. The youngest daughter is Ann, a violinist. A new tenant to the house is an angry young man named Mickey, an orchestral arranger and friend of Felix. Mickey immediately falls in love with Ann, but Felix also has had his eyes on her and proposes marriage.
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 in 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.
