Five of a Kind (1938)

Interesting facts

Five of a Kind is a 1938 American comedy film directed by Herbert I. Leeds and written by Lou Breslow and John Patrick. The film stars the Dionne quintuplets, Jean Hersholt, Claire Trevor and Cesar Romero. The film was released on October 14, 1938, by 20th Century Fox. The film follows the escalating rivalry between radio journalists Duke Lester (Romero) and Christine Nelson (Trevor) that culminates in a competition to cover the exploits of the famous Canadian quintuplets, the Wyatts, played by The Dionne Quintuplets.

Production

The Wyatt quintuplets in the movie are shown to live an idealized version of the life of the Dionne quintuplets. All of the scenes with the Wyatts were filmed in the Dionne quintuplets' home known as Quintland in Corbeil, Ontario, with their real-life nurses also present on-screen. Jean Hersholt is the only actor in the film to interact with the Dionnes.

The film's narrative is almost entirely divorced from the scenes with the Dionnes, which are largely improvised and mainly consist of the four-year-old sisters playing, or leading their everyday lives. They do sing two songs in unison, but these are not "musical numbers" in any produced sense. They have little dialogue, and as they spoke French, even less intelligible dialogue to English-language audiences.

Shortly after their birth, the Dionne girls were made wards of the state and raised in a theme park type hospital situation which was across the street from their parents home. The parents would visit, but rarely interact with the children directly, and the raising of the children was by nurses and doctors. For the first nine years of their life, the Dionne quintuplets children were treated like a zoo attraction.

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