The entire packaging of this Warner Bros. film includes director Michael Curtiz, screenwriter Julius Epstein, composer Max Steiner, and Claude Rains all who (not unsurprisingly) would have their hand in that revered classic Casablanca (1942).

Here the Lane Sisters are joined in their quartet by Gale Page with Claude Rains playing the musical patriarch of his family who has trained his daughters up to be an orchestra right in his living room. He’s a belligerent but good-willed father with all his show of bluster merely a facade to hide a heart of pure gold. The role slightly subverts many of Rains’ typically even-keeled gentlemen.

Most of these opening sequences draw up just how quaint and delightful they all are together and what a perfect little life they share as the men begin to show up in their lives to call on them. Isn’t love grand? That’s what we might be prompted to surmise is the film’s main theme.

Four Daughters teeters perilously on the edge of being insufferably schmaltzy to its core and yet it seems that the arrival of John Garfield and the insertion of his character into this idyllic world of giggling girls and small-town romance is just enough to save this story and make into something worth remembering.

Mickey Boyd (Garfield) walks into their home as an acerbic outsider who thrums his nose at the picture-perfect American family in their quintessential American home but he also has a gift for the piano and as musicians themselves, that’s an instant point of connection. Furthermore, he’s come into town as a favor to his old colleague Felix Deitz (Jeffrey Lynn) who happens to be a close family friend and maybe one of the nicest guys you’ve ever met, either onscreen or off.

Still, Mickey is a tough one to crack but that doesn’t keep the maternal Aunt Etta (May Robson) or vivacious young Ann (Priscilla Lane) from trying their best to figure him out. In fact, Mickey becomes a bit of a pet project for Ann as she looks to slowly transform him into an honest to goodness genial human being. She does a fairly good job at it too as he is brought into the fold of the family for every subsequent round of holiday festivities.

The second act proves to be the most potent and whether or not the turn of events are truly probable does not detract from how affecting these sequences turn out to be. And ironically, at the center of it all are Mickey and Ann. The man who has always been the outsider looking in and the youngest sister full of playful precociousness. He is the one who helps her see things as they actually are and she, in turn, continually spruces up his life and to use an inane phrase, she “turns his frown upside down.”

But I think that’s the key to the final act of Four Daughters. It’s dramatic but it loses that almost sickening layer of sugarcoating and shocks everyone within the frame of the film back to the reality of the world with one tragic event or two events depending on what you deem the tragedy to be. This doesn’t simply feel like a mere play for our emotions — though it might be partially this — but it’s really a bit of a representation of what life actually throws our way.

That’s why Mickey is by far the most important character in this picture and he’s so necessary for it to be anything more than typical Hollywood fare because in some sense John Garfield makes that man into a real person. He’s not necessarily a bad fellow. In fact, we kind of like him because he seems a bit sardonic, frank, and he’s not going out trying to be something that he’s not.

True, the Hollywood happy ending is tacked on as we come to expect but perhaps in the closing moments, as the sisters look through the drawing room window and Ann is back to her gate-swinging ways with her beau as before, we can gain some satisfaction in the moment. Not simply because all is right in this little universe but the family went through trials and now are better for it — more attuned to the world. They are no longer simply four daughters or soon to be four wives. They are four women.

The film was dressed up in Technicolor in Young at Heart (1954) with Doris Day and Frank Sinatra and Sinatra elevated that film much as Garfield does here. His tune “All the Way” while having no bearing on the plot is nevertheless a memorable number. I have nothing against Mr. Lemp’s taste in music nor his disdain for the contemporary bilge of his day but I rather like the crooners myself.

3.5/5 Stars