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Those Who Meddle: In Defence of Henry Koster
Mounting a heroic and lonely defence of the much-maligned Hollywood filmmaker Henry Koster, Lukas Foerster dives deep into the intricate science of Kosterology, investigating the man's massive filmography with wit, sophistication, and a Kosterian sense of mischievous fun.
By Lukas Foerster
Harvey (Henry Koster, 1950)Let’s start with an axiom: he or she who meddles is always right. To say this also means saying that the world is not fine as it is, unmeddled with. Things will not work out on their own. Simply leaning back and observing the natural order of things – and also, more importantly for the cinema of Henry Koster, the human theatre – will not do the trick. What we need in order to unleash the best possible version of this world and ourselves is some kind of trickster, someone who is at the same time of the world and outside of it. A catalogue of figures that might fit the bill: orphans, teenage girls, drunkards, grumpy old men, nuns, angels, spinsters, imaginary rabbits. Often, they come in pairs. Old men and young girls go especially well together in Henry Koster’s meddler’s films.
She or he who meddles is always right. To say this also means saying, though, that the world is not irredeemably rotten. Indeed, looking at it from the outside, perpetual happiness is almost a given. Koster’s cinema is chock-full with well-meaning, smiling, well-groomed (and often well-fed) people embedded in neat worlds of Old Hollywood production design, people whose natural habitat is the slightly claustrophobic coziness of the soundstage. People surrounded by people. That is, people always already inducted into communities, especially into (extended) families. Even the trickster is a loner only in the beginning, if at all, and does his or her best to immerse him- or herself into a community in need of healing. A community that is also very much eager to be healed.
Healing means: things falling into place in ways they should have to begin with. It does not necessarily mean progress, or lessons learned, or evil conquered. Healing is not a moral prerogative, or a moral victory won, but a feat of miraculous engineering. In Koster’s films, just about anything can be in need of engineering (and healing). Sometimes, a hospital needs to be built (Come to the Stable, 1949), and sometimes, a cathedral needs not to be built (The Bishop’s Wife, 1947). Sometimes, an orchestra must be allowed to play (A Hundred Men and a Girl, 1937), and sometimes, a dancer must not be allowed to dance (The Unfinished Dance, 1947). Sometimes, an airplane’s tail needs to both break off and not break off (No Highway in the Sky, 1951). Only one thing is certain: Healing means succumbing to the powers of movie magic.
Henry Koster’s special brand of movie magic remains mostly unheralded. Even among die-hard auteurists, his name is given hardly a mention. If at all, he is remembered as the director of some random, decidedly old-fashioned childhood favorite, be it A Hundred Men and a Girl with Deanna Durbin, The Bishop’s Wife with Cary Grant and Loretta Young, or, of course, Harvey (1950) with James Stewart. Indeed, Koster was a popular hitmaker first and foremost. Throughout his career, he turned most of what he touched into gold. In the 1930s, his most productive decade, he directed popular classics in four different countries and three languages. He also almost single handedly saved a Hollywood studio, Universal, from bankruptcy with his musicals starring Durbin. In the 1940s he was a solid, studio-hopping hitmaker, and in 1953 he turned The Robe, the first film in CinemaScope, into one of the biggest blockbusters of the decade. While his films had an increasingly harder time at the box office during the final years of his career, he still managed to pull off an occasional future television classic like Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962).
The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953)
Koster, born 1905 as Hermann Kosterlitz in Berlin, Germany, started out as a screenwriter during the silent era, and switched to directing in 1932. He hit his stride early, with his second film. The Ugly Girl (Das hässliche Mädchen, 1933) is a musical comedy in the giddy, hedonist style popular in the late Weimar Republic - but already there are traces of a different, more sentimental tone slipping in, like the Pygmalion style transformation of the main protagonist. It also turned out to be the last film the director made in his native Germany; Hitler took power in Berlin during the film’s production, and Koster, a Jew, resettled in Vienna. There, he teamed up with producer Joe Pasternak, screenwriter Felix Jackson, and Hungarian-born actress Franziska Gaal - all fellow emigres no longer allowed to work in Germany - to create three tender, heart-breaking musical comedies that proved extremely popular with local audiences. As did The Crosspatch (De Kribbebijter, 1935), Koster’s sole Dutch film made around the same time. In 1936 Koster, Jackson and Pasternak left for Hollywood. Gaal stayed behind at first. She came later, separately, for her own brief, unfortunate Hollywood career. She was replaced, in Koster’s first American films, by Deanna Durbin.
In some ways, Koster’s German language films with Gaal – Peter (1934), Little Mother (Kleine Mutti, 1935), Catherine the Last (Katharina, die Letzte, 1936) – feel like blueprints for his later Hollywood work. There is the characteristic mixture of humour and sentiment, already fully developed, as is Koster’s feel for gentle satire, his eye for hyper-expressive, almost comic-book-style human behaviour as well as his knack for using music both as a tool of the characters’ self-expression and as a narrative device, as something that is internal and external at the same time. In short: Koster comes into his own as a director of modern fairytales infused with a sense of everyday utopia. Even the theme of benevolent alcoholism is established early, in Peter, by one of the greatest performances of Felix Bressart, an actor very much in tune with Koster’s style. Indeed, if you’ll allow the tangent, I’d say that the pleasures of boozing might be the single most consistent motif running through Koster’s filmography. Only in Harvey, alcoholism comes close to taking centre stage, though, in most of his other films it is presented, again and again, as just another part of the world. The striking absence of moral judgment in Koster’s work is never more obvious than in its depiction of heavy drinking. Alcoholism even of the more destructive sort has to be accepted, even supported as an individual’s solution to the problems the world throws at all of us.
And yet, Koster’s cinema also changes once he moves to Hollywood. As fantasies about female upward mobility by way of marriage, the Gaal films, as well as The Ugly Girl and The Crosspatch, have their roots in the European operetta tradition. Their engineering is still the engineering of an older, more patriarchal age, stuck between feudalistic norms and an emerging modernity. The decisive agent for this kind of engineering is fate - a power strictly external to the social forces it acts upon. This means that the engineering does not happen in the film, but is enacted upon it. By the director, of course.
The one key element Koster adds to his formula at Universal is American pragmatism. The difference is most obvious when comparing his two most important leading ladies: Gaal is, in almost all of her films, a woman-child, a woman in her thirties often playing teenagers and always exuding an air of naive innocence. Deanna Durbin, on the other hand, 14 when she was signed at Universal, really is a teenager, and whether or not she is innocent is besides the point. Because she is, first and foremost, an engineer, a meddler, molding the world according to her wishes.
What’s more, she really is a pest while doing so. Her whole persona is built around mechanisms of emotional extortion. Her first film, Three Smart Girls (1936), is especially blunt about this. The task she sets for herself in her debut is to reunite her estranged parents. A feat she accomplishes, in the end, by the crudest of behaviouristic tricks: When father meets mother again, Deanna is standing next to him, lifting his arm for him, and waving it towards her. The film does not even try to hide the fact that she gets away with her downright terroristic shenanigans only because of her cuteness. Three Smart Girls starts with a close-up of her singing, and later on, again and again doubles down on the premise that she who has the voice of an angel, can do no wrong. Unlike with Gaal (or Shirley Temple, or even, despite her also being one of cinema’s great pragmatists, Mary Pickford), a shot of Durbin is never just whimsical, never just something to be consumed on its own terms. Durbin close-ups point inevitably towards the future. They are always action images (exchange-value rather than use-value) - and they are all the more effective since Koster, who generally prefers long shots depicting the interaction of several people in one frame, uses close-ups sparingly. In other worlds: on screen, Durbin is a tool, and proudly so.
Firmly establishing him in Hollywood, Three Smart Girls is the most important film in Koster’s career. It is not among his best, though. His later Durbin films wisely opt for more ridiculous premises in order to hide their mechanistic underpinnings. In A Hundred Men and a Girl, Deanna again wins over an old man by manipulating his hands - in much more intricate and playful ways, though. This time, she tricks a conductor into working with an orchestra comprised of unemployed musicians - by smuggling the artists into the conductor’s mansion, where they start doing their thing. And once the conductor starts listening to the music he loves, he cannot help himself: his hand is starting to itch. The orchestra conducting the conductor: this is the kind of gentle irony Koster’s best films thrive on.
Continuing with Koster’s leading ladies, he unfortunately only made one film with Danielle Darrieux, who, in The Rage of Paris (1938), combines Durbin’s go-getter-persona with Gaal’s more lyrical, almost faun-like presence in a highly original slapstick performance. Together with Koster’s last Durbin-film, It Started With Eve (1941), it is also the closest Koster ever came to directing a bona-fide screwball comedy - a genre he clearly was more than qualified to excel in but that ultimately did not seem to interest him all that much. The Rage of Paris and It Started With Eve are very funny, to be sure, yet in both films the formation of the central couple keeps getting sidelined for other attractions. In the latter, for example, Deanna clearly prefers the company of her love interest’s father - played by Charles Laughton as one of Koster’s many wonderful grouchy old men - to that of his son.
After It Started With Eve, Koster left Universal for MGM - while exchanging, on that occasion, Durbin for an even younger actress, Metro’s emerging child star, Margaret O’Brien. Fitting his generally unsatisfactory experience at the studio, he only made two films with O’Brien (and unfortunately never got to work with the Freed Unit), of which one, however, is among his most intriguing. Based on a 1937 French film by Jean Benoît-Lévy and Marie Epstein, The Unfinished Dance plays out like a dark inversion of the Koster formula. O’Brien plays a young ballet student obsessed with an up and coming ballerina (Cyd Charisse). When a visiting European dancer threatens to steal her idol’s limelight, she engineers her downfall - literally, with Cyd’s rival vanishing into a hole on stage.
There clearly is nothing whatsoever redeemable about O’Brien’s actions and indeed she spends the rest of the film repenting. And yet… she gets her wish. The foreign dancer is forced to retire, while Cyd Charisse continues her rise to stardom. What’s more: O’Brien’s desperate close-ups are as intense and as emotionally true as were Durbin’s gleaming ones in earlier Koster films. So, is there really a difference between the two? In The Unfinished Dance, Koster’s moral universe collapses completely, and yet, the show must go on. Fittingly, the film is taken over by full-blown, almost phantasmagorical artifice in ways Koster’s films normally are not. We are lost in a counter-world of escalating cinematic stage tricks and free-floating wide-eyed cute-little-girl-affect with nothing tangible left to hold on to.
In the same year, 1947, both the fantastic and religion enter Koster’s cinema for the first time with full force: The Bishop’s Wife has Cary Grant roaming the earth as an angel. He encounters a world already enchanted, though, as evidenced by the beautiful first scene in which the Christmas decorations displayed in store windows lend the surrounding cityscape an air of giddy, almost utopian unreality. In what follows, the rather straightforward approach to social engineering of the Durbin films makes way for a more ironic, and ultimately absurdist mode of constructivist fantasy play, like when Grant, allegedly sent to earth to assist a bishop in building a cathedral, ends up saving the man’s marriage instead - by wooing the bishop’s wife.
Come to the Stable, Harvey, and the underwhelming The Luck of the Irish (1948) follow a similar pattern. At the height of his creative powers, Koster excelled as Hollywood’s leading soft surrealist, creating films in which sentimentality is inseparable from ingenuity. As is escapism from an unwavering commitment to the traditional fabrics of society. Despite all the tongue-in-cheek metaphysics, religion in Koster is a social force first and a spiritual one, at best, second. Like family, it is a force that brings people together, proving an inexhaustible well of “inner enlightenment” that helps people adapt to a changing world. Of course, this kind of worldview - that might be traced back to both New Deal idealism and older European ideas of the romantic tradition - was bound to collide with the increasingly cynical and, ultimately, combative societal mood of the post-war decades. As it, indeed, did.
The key film and turning point in Koster’s oeuvre is not his biggest commercial success, The Robe, but one he made two years earlier. No Highway in the Sky is the first Koster film in which the meddler must fight not within the community, but outside of and against it. The mood is set early, in a scene of two men inconsequential to the plot visiting an aeronautical engineering site - a self-contained world of machinery, claustrophobic and threatening. The hero, played by James Stewart, is a loner and can only conquer this world - and the business interests supporting it - by retreating into the abstract spaces of mathematics. Koster assembles an ersatz community around him, consisting of his girl-genius daughter, a warm-hearted stewardess, and Marlene Dietrich playing, more or less, herself. The female companions assist him in reaching his goal, yet in the end he remains locked into his own mind.
No Highway to the Sky might be the only film in which Koster ably tackled the post-war modernity of high-tech consumer culture, instrumental reason, and social alienation head-on. Otherwise, his work does not generally survive contact with it; Koster’s cinema does not exactly collapse afterwards, but he stops being a great filmmaker. To be sure, even before that, like virtually every contract director in the studio era, he occasionally was handed projects he was not able to fully make his own. After No Highway in the Sky, though, the ratio inverts. Among his later works there are some interesting oddities like the wacky Gothic mystery My Cousin Rachel (1952), a film that seems to be constantly trying to figure out the meanderings of its own plot, or D-Day the Sixth of June (1956), a surprisingly intimate World War II blockbuster. The series of three films he made in the 1960s with Stewart, Mister Hobbs Takes a Vacation, Take Her, She’s Mine (1963), and Dear Brigitte (1965, pointing towards Brigitte Bardot’s unfulfilled potential as yet another lovely Koster leading lady) provide quite a bit of pleasure too, in the way they acknowledge and play around with their own old-fashionedness. Still, in the end it mostly comes down to Uncle Jimmy vs These Strange New Times. Koster’s cinema no longer believes in the power of its own engineering.
The Robe itself is quite a bit better and weirder than its reputation suggests, too, if only because in the end the titular robe ends up doing the heavy lifting of spreading the lord’s word. No sweeping spiritual revelations in this one, just a surprisingly high-strung and idiosyncratic attempt to put as much money and as much of Richard Burton’s overacting on screen. I will not try to make a case for Koster as a stealth CinemaScope stylist, and even less so when it comes to the often ill-advised projects he tried his hand at in the mid to late 1950s. In quite a few of his widescreen movies, ‘scope really just means cramming in more stuff, which results in rather uneasy arrangements and people cohabitating on screen that were never meant to. Even projects that would seem to play to his strengths, like the Gregory La Cava remake My Man Godfrey (1957), or his swan song, the biopic The Singing Nun (1966), fall flat.
Maybe Koster was one of those artists capable of shining only in tune with rather than in opposition to the times. Of course, the changing realities of studio filmmaking after the 1948 Paramount Decree took full effect might have played a role, too. Only once, in 1955, did his cinema regain its full force again. Good Morning, Miss Dove has Jennifer Jones playing a geography teacher feared yet also admired by all of her students, or rather, the entire community she serves. Hospitalized after suddenly overcome by illness right in the classroom, her sickbed is turned into the site of the last synthesis, the final proof of successful engineering of Koster’s cinema. Flashbacks reveal examples of her benevolent meddling in the lives of her students, and we see the grown-up results of this meddling – now adults – start to flock her way. In the end the whole town seems to have been assembled in front of the hospital door. For one last time, a community declares itself worthy of movie magic, Koster style.
A Hundred Men and a Girl (Henry Koster, 1937)
Originally published in Outskirts Nº3 in July 2025. The print issue can be ordered at our online shop.