Was Deanna Lip-synching To a Different Vocalist?
I've just encountered the films of Deanna Durbin. I've watched all 6 of the films in the Sweetheart collection. I've enjoyed them all. The power of Durbin's voice just blew me away: at 14 she sounded like an adult opera singer at full maturity. But I noticed that in all the earlier films, her opera-trained voice was used; she sang in no other style. On the other hand, in the last film in my collection the 1947 Something in the Wind, her style is jazzier, sexier, strikingly different. The producers made a big deal out of the change in her vocal style -- emphasizing it in the trailer for the movie. But one can imagine her taking some training with some people in Hollywood and working out a new vocal style, and somehow, the songs in the 1947 film, though in a different style, seem to me to be an imaginable transformation of Durbin's voice. But this 1945 film, Lady on a Train, has me wondering.
Her rendition of Silent Night sounds just like the earlier Durbin. But in her rendition of the nightclub scene tunes, Give Me a Little Kiss, and Night and Day -- especially Night and Day -- she sounds neither like the sweet opera-trained singer of the early films, nor like the girl in the 1947 film. As I listened to Night and Day, I tried to conjure up some other singers I knew with that peculiar tone quality, and one of them who came to mind was a singer who actually acted in the picture -- Patricia Morison. Three years after this, Morison would be doing Kiss Me Kate, and something about the tone quality of the songs reminded me of Morison. It wasn't exactly the Kiss Me Kate voice, but it had a quality different from Durbin's. The thought crossed my mind that they might have hired Morison partly to act as the writer's girlfriend, but partly to do the jazzier vocals, if Durbin had not yet mastered the vocal style that she showed in 1947.
Durbin appears to be lip-synching in parts of Night and Day. To be sure, that is not sufficient evidence that the voice belonged to anyone else. After all, in her other movies, she sometimes had to lip-synch to her own voice, e.g., when she was riding a horse and buggy outside in Can't Help Singing. Nonetheless, a nightclub scene, in a fixed indoor set, would have been relatively easy to record with her singing live. And that tone quality -- it doesn't sound like Durbin's voice modified to sing nightclubby. It sounds like someone else's voice.
I'm not of course saying that Durbin was not a *good enough* singer that someone else had to do the tunes for her. It's a question of the tonal quality of the voice in the nightclub songs. I'm not convinced it's her, and in saying that I'm not slamming her vocal ability.
Has anyone out there ever heard any reports that Durbin was dubbed for any of her jazzier numbers in any of her pictures? Or has anyone out there wondered the same thing?