​​​​​​​Susan Evans Grove

Swiss Miss 1942 is an American motion picture about a young girl living in a remote village in the Swiss Alps who invents snow skiing so she can get to the big city. 

Plot: Guiiana Egger (La Treque) lives high in the Swiss Alps with her mother, her father, and her 12 brothers and sisters. The father is a farmer and all of Guiliana’s brothers and sisters were happily following in his footsteps but Guiliana had different plans. She wants to move to Geneva and be a waitress. Never having been down from the mountain, her aspirations do not extend far beyond her family's generational pursuit of feeding people but she knows there has to be a more glamorous way to do it. 

One day Guiliana asks her father what happened to the food they grow and when he told her the tale of transportation, commerce, and cooking she latched on to the icon of the waitress which she thought must be incredibly glamorous. The problem was having never left the mountain farm and she had no idea how to do it. One day while daydreaming on a gentle slope she saw a branch fall from a tree and gracefully slide down the hill in the snow.That’s it she thought and from then on every day after her chores were done she scoured the mountaintop for the perfect bark that she wore down to a smooth surface with a tool her father used to sharpen the blades of his plough. When they were finally ready she craftily broke the handles off of two rakes to use to balance herself fand strapped herself onto the planks with belts stolen from two of her brothers. She was on her way to Geneva to show the world her invention and start her life as a waitress.

Naturally disappointments abound once she reaches Geneva and learns she did not invent skiing. As she is turned away from yet another restaurant that won’t hire her due to lack of experience she meets a kindly older gentleman and begins the charmed life of a Swiss Mrs. (leaving room for the sequel that thankfully never came).

One cannot help but notice the insult to the Swiss by the German Director of this picture. The Germans commonly viewed the Swiss as Medieval and simple. While this viewpoint may have helped the Swiss to maintain their “armed neutrality” during the war it did not endear that to the growing number of German directors and screenwriters in Hollywood.

This film is Elva La Treque’s first role with Mitsumount Pictures and perhaps foreshadows her fortune and her servitude to the studio. It also echoes the actress's 19 year old naivete and the magnitude of what she herself did not yet know when she signed her life away to the studio. While her hometown of Menominee MI is not as far removed as the top of the Alps it is still a long way from the glamor of Hollywood that was about to eat her up.

Scooping up young and fresh faces from the midwest was a common course for the studios of the time. The less life experience these young stars had the more they were able to shape and refine them into an image that served their box office sales.

Even before La Treque set foot on the set of her first film she and other starlets were disciplined in a strict course of etiquette, movement, and elocution which were meant to shape their on and off screen personas.