Judy's last MGM film is bright, colorful and cheery but excepting two numbers a minor musical in her canon.
Judy is wonderfully alive and sprightly, amazing in itself since the production of this was famously fraught with delays due to her fragile physical and emotional state during shooting. She's in glorious voice but her weight fluctuates noticeably from scene to scene, most jarringly in the finale where she walks off stage plump and reemerges whippet thin within the same show. There are other instances as well, the "Howdy Neigbor" number which should have taken 3 days to shoot and ended up taking 3 weeks, only completed by splicing together different successful takes, is the most obvious. Whole backgrounds change abruptly behind her while she's singing!
The first of the two numbers that raise the film above the norm is the justly famous "Get Happy". An icon making moment that was filmed two weeks after the film had wrapped during which Judy had lost 20 pounds creating one of those sequences that were it not so galvanizing in and of itself would take you right out of the film. It is a bit jarring anyway since the quality of the material is so high above the rest of the film and in particular the awful number that precedes it, a barnyard travesty with Phil Silvers and Gene Kelly that is probably the worst thing he's ever done.
The second number stands out in several ways. It's the hauntingly beautiful "Friendly Star" which Judy sings with tender delicacy, it's the scene in the film where she looks her best and it's appended by the movie's best straight passage, a tentative love scene between Judy and Gene.
The rest of the film doesn't match these two high points but there are several pleasant scenes. Gene dances with newspapers, the lead pair tear it up during a barn dance that shows what an accomplished dancer Judy was, she effortlessly keeps up with Kelly. The film is loaded with high quality MGM stock players with Marjorie Main adding her customary basso spice to the proceedings.
Metro had originally planned to reunite Judy with Mickey Rooney but changed their mind, a wise decision on their part since the two had grown apart in their performance styles. Just watch them in their last teaming in "Words and Music" two years prior to this, Judy has matured into an accomplished adult song interpreter while Mickey is still trying to get away with the same old tricks from a decade before and making a fool of himself. Fortunately Gene Kelly stepped into the role because of Judy and the kindness she had shown him in his first film "For Me & My Gal", they are a much better match. While his part isn't completely secondary it's Judy that stands out and she's the reason to see this. A shame to realize that after this she would only make five more films in the following 19 years and only two of those were musicals, a great loss to cinema.
Judy is wonderfully alive and sprightly, amazing in itself since the production of this was famously fraught with delays due to her fragile physical and emotional state during shooting. She's in glorious voice but her weight fluctuates noticeably from scene to scene, most jarringly in the finale where she walks off stage plump and reemerges whippet thin within the same show. There are other instances as well, the "Howdy Neigbor" number which should have taken 3 days to shoot and ended up taking 3 weeks, only completed by splicing together different successful takes, is the most obvious. Whole backgrounds change abruptly behind her while she's singing!
The first of the two numbers that raise the film above the norm is the justly famous "Get Happy". An icon making moment that was filmed two weeks after the film had wrapped during which Judy had lost 20 pounds creating one of those sequences that were it not so galvanizing in and of itself would take you right out of the film. It is a bit jarring anyway since the quality of the material is so high above the rest of the film and in particular the awful number that precedes it, a barnyard travesty with Phil Silvers and Gene Kelly that is probably the worst thing he's ever done.
The second number stands out in several ways. It's the hauntingly beautiful "Friendly Star" which Judy sings with tender delicacy, it's the scene in the film where she looks her best and it's appended by the movie's best straight passage, a tentative love scene between Judy and Gene.
The rest of the film doesn't match these two high points but there are several pleasant scenes. Gene dances with newspapers, the lead pair tear it up during a barn dance that shows what an accomplished dancer Judy was, she effortlessly keeps up with Kelly. The film is loaded with high quality MGM stock players with Marjorie Main adding her customary basso spice to the proceedings.
Metro had originally planned to reunite Judy with Mickey Rooney but changed their mind, a wise decision on their part since the two had grown apart in their performance styles. Just watch them in their last teaming in "Words and Music" two years prior to this, Judy has matured into an accomplished adult song interpreter while Mickey is still trying to get away with the same old tricks from a decade before and making a fool of himself. Fortunately Gene Kelly stepped into the role because of Judy and the kindness she had shown him in his first film "For Me & My Gal", they are a much better match. While his part isn't completely secondary it's Judy that stands out and she's the reason to see this. A shame to realize that after this she would only make five more films in the following 19 years and only two of those were musicals, a great loss to cinema.