Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/10/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, November 10, 2019

Summer Stock (Charles Walters, 1950)

Summer Stock (Charles Walters, 1950)

Cast: Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Eddie Bracken, Gloria DeHaven, Marjorie Main, Phil Silvers, Ray Collins, Nita Bieber, Carleton Carpenter, Hans Conried. Screenplay: George Wells, Sy Gomberg. Cinematography: Robert H. Planck. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Jack Martin Smith. Film editing: Albert Akst. Music: Conrad Salinger; songs by Harry Warren, Mack Gordon, Saul Chaplin, Harold Arlen, Ted Koehler.

Summer Stock seems almost like a warmup for that string of great MGM musicals that followed: An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951), Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952), and The Band Wagon (Minnelli, 1953). It doesn't have as good a song score as they do, and its screenplay lacks the wit that Alan Jay Lerner, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green provided for them. It has two great numbers: Judy Garland's "Get Happy" and Gene Kelly's solo in which he does miraculous things with a squeaky floorboard and a sheet of newspaper. But mostly it seems to be remembered as Garland's last film for MGM as she descended into the emotional wilderness of her later years. She was returning to the screen after being fired from Annie Get Your Gun (George Sidney, 1950), but she asked to be let out of her contract with MGM after completing Summer Stock. Aside from Kelly and Garland, there's not much else to recommend about the film. Eddie Bracken plays his usual nebbish with a sinus condition -- a variation on the character he played in Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, 1944), and Phil Silvers does some overstated clowning. The plot is nonsense about a Broadway tryout being staged in the barn on the farm owned by Garland's character, with the usual gags about city slickers trying to feed chickens and milk cows. Garland's character is engaged to Bracken's, and Kelly's is having a fling with Garland's sister, played by Gloria DeHaven. Naturally, by film's end the sisters have switched partners. But the film belongs to Garland and Kelly whenever they're on screen, and a thumb ready for the fast-forward button to those moments gets a good workout.