This post is adapted and expanded from an article I wrote for the November 22, 2007 issue of the Sacramento News & Review.
I always dread this time of year, when the holiday movies are trotted out. You can’t turn around without hearing some jackass bitch about how much he hates It’s a Wonderful Life. He can’t get enough of “I am your father, Luke” or “I’m King o’ the World!”, but Zuzu’s petals once a year is just more than he can bear.
It makes me nostalgic for the days when I had It’s a Wonderful Life all to myself (and yes, there was such a time). Well, almost to myself, anyhow. Certainly everybody else who knew and loved Frank Capra’s picture had my own last name. Back about 1974 or so, in college, I had two friends who made a nightly ritual of staying up to watch car dealer Jay Brown’s all-night movies on Channel 36 out of San Jose. One day — and it was nowhere near Christmas — they rushed up to me bubbling with enthusiasm for this great Jimmy Stewart movie they’d seen the night before. They figured if anyone would know about it, I would, and they were right. That was — for me, anyhow — the beginning of the revival of It’s a Wonderful Life. And the beginning of the end for my family and me having the memory of It’s a Wonderful Life all to ourselves. Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad the picture finally came into its own, and I thank a merciful Providence that Capra, Stewart and Donna Reed all lived to see it. But then again, when people like that hypothetical (but all too credible) killjoy I mentioned above feel free to rag on it, sometimes I’m not so sure.
So I almost hesitate to mention Remember the Night. Maybe I wouldn’t, but the cat seems to be getting out of the bag. When I wrote about Remember the Night in 2007, it was available only on out-of-print used VHS or bootleg copies of an AMC broadcast from the 1990s. Things are different now; the movie’s available in an above-board (and beautiful) DVD from the TCM Web site (and as usual, there’s an even better deal at Amazon), and I figure it’s only a matter of time before someone runs up to me bubbling with enthusiasm about this great Fred MacMurray-Barbara Stanwyck movie they saw the other night. I want to be able to say I’m way ahead of them.
Most of the reason for Remember the Night‘s resurgency — I mean in artistic terms, independent of the arcane ins and outs of who owns a film and who decides there’s a market for it — is its writer, Preston Sturges. This was the last script he ever wrote for somebody else to direct, the somebody in this case being Mitchell Leisen, then second only to his mentor Cecil B. DeMille as the alpha dog among Paramount directors (a position he would soon cede to — or at least share with — Sturges himself). Leisen’s star has slipped a bit since his heyday in the ’30s and ’40s, alleviated somewhat by an excellent biography, Mitchell Leisen: Hollywood Director by David Chierichetti, originally published in 1973 (the year after Leisen died), then revised and expanded in 1995. I’ll have more to say about some of Leisen’s pictures later.
Right now I’m talking about Remember the Night. The version of Sturges’ script published in Three More Screenplays by Preston Sturges is a facsimile of Sturges’ actual typescript, dated June 15, 1939 and bearing the title The Amazing Marriage. Written in by hand on the title page is “Remember the Night[,] Or”. Obviously, neither Sturges nor producer-director Leisen ever came up with a really good title. The Amazing Marriage at least has some slight connection to a line from the script, albeit one Leisen cut during shooting. The picture’s final title, though, is so generic as to be meaningless.
If the title is generic, however, it’s the only thing about Remember the Night that is. Stanwyck plays Lee Leander, a hardboiled, tough cookie who gets busted in New York for lifting a diamond bracelet from a Fifth Avenue jewelry store. MacMurray is assistant D.A. Jack Sargent, about to leave town to drive to his mother’s farm in Indiana for Christmas when his boss yanks him in to prosecute Lee. Disgruntled and eager to get on the road, he takes advantage of a legal technicality and gets the case continued until after New Year’s. Then he begins feeling guilty about leaving Lee in jail over the holidays and arranges to get her bailed out. To his surprise and discomfort, the bail bondsman remands Lee to his custody, and the surprise is compounded when, despite the fact that he was prosecuting her only that afternoon, the two find themselves taking a liking to one another. They even learn that they grew
At the humble Sargent farm outside Wabash, Ind., Lee’s hard shell begins to soften and melt in the glow of a household suffused by warmth, affection and mutual support — the kind of nurturing family atmosphere that was completely missing from her own upbringing just a few towns away. This idyll of a Hoosier holiday brims with lovely moments, from Sterling Holloway leading the family in singing “The End of a Perfect Day” around the Christmas tree to the always-delightful Elizabeth Patterson (here at her sweetest) ruefully musing about her own youthful brush with romance (“I twiddled around with the idea one summer; was all right again by fall.”).
Patterson’s Aunt Emma sees clearly what we do: Love — the other kind of love — is beginning to bloom between Lee and Jack, and they allow themselves to forget — almost — that she’s a repeat offender, and come January 3 he’s going to have to try to send her to jail for a long time.
Oh, and one more thing. Don’t come around in 2037 moaning about how you’re sick and tired of Remember the Night. I won’t want to hear it.
An interesting artifact has come into my hands on loan from an old friend. It’s an early draft of the screenplay for MGM’s 1935 movie of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! by the husband-and-wife team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett.
The first major difference is in the treatment of Wallace Beery’s role. Beery (left) gets top billing in the picture, playing Sid Davis, the brother of Spring Byington’s Essie Miller and the brother-in-law of Essie’s husband Nat (second-billed Lionel Barrymore, right). O’Neill’s play all takes place on one day — July 4, 1906 — but the Hacketts had expanded the time frame to open a week or two earlier (“late June”), before Sid enters the action (he comes back to the Miller household after being fired for drunkenness from his newspaper job in a neighboring town). So in this January 18 draft, Sid doesn’t show up until page 40 (of 93), on the morning of the Fourth. This would hardly do for a star of Beery’s standing at the time (I wouldn’t put it past him to have griped about it himself, loud and long), so a scene was added showing him going off with high hopes — for both his new job and his newfound sobriety — at the end of June, before slinking back to the Millers in time for the holiday. (“Ma! Pa! Uncle Sid’s come to spend the Fourth!” To which Sid mutters under his breath: “The Fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ad infinitum.”)
As for the second major difference, it’s another scene that doesn’t appear in O’Neill’s play — a major one, just over 15 minutes long. I don’t know when it was inserted into the script, but God bless the Hacketts for writing it, and Clarence Brown for directing it so beautifully, because it’s one of the best and funniest scenes in the whole movie. Most of it takes place during the graduation ceremony at the high school in this small Connecticut city, where Nat and Essie Miller’s middle son Richard (Eric Linden) will be the valedictorian. Before Richard’s speech, however, we’re treated to a generous sampling of the commencement program: the school glee club singing “The Blue Danube”, an earnest young student reciting Mark Antony’s funeral oration from Julius Caesar; a more nervous youngster offering Poe’s “The Bells” (“…of the bells bells bells bells bells bells bells…”) and studiously counting every “bells” off on his fingers; a girl student’s how-I-spent-my-summer-vacation travelogue about her family’s visit to the Swiss Alps; and my favorite, this young lady (I wish I knew her name) struggling doggedly through a clarinet solo, darting irritated glances toward her piano accompanist at every real and imagined mistake.
In their adaptation, the Hacketts emphasized the one slim thread of plot in O’Neill’s nostalgic reverie of a youth he never had: the emotional growing pains of the Millers’ middle son Richard, from his jejune flirtation with radical politics to his blossoming romance with neighbor girl Muriel McComber (Cecilia Parker) and the mean-spirited oppostion of her father. In so doing, the Hacketts handed 25-year-old Eric Linden the opportunity to give the performance of his career — and he delivered in style. Never mind that he gets no better than fourth billing; Ah, Wilderness! is Eric Linden’s picture from beginning to end. And never mind that he was a good decade too old for the role; his boyishness made him look not a day over 16, and his performance did the rest. Linden had a busy career in the 1930s — mostly in B-pictures for RKO, Warners and MGM — without ever really becoming a star; this was his only chance to carry an A-picture on his own. After this it was back to Bs at Metro and on loan to various studios and independent producers. But before he finally closed out his career in 1943 with Criminals Within (for lowly Producers Releasing Corporation, the skid row flophouse of Hollywood studios), he would give one more performance that I’m sure everyone who ever saw it will remember to their dying day:
He was the Confederate soldier in Gone With the Wind who has just learned from Harry Davenport’s Dr. Meade that his leg will have to be amputated. He is on screen for less than three seconds, but his desperate cries (“Don’t cut! Don’t! — cut! Ple-e-e-e-ease!!”) have curdled the blood of millions of moviegoers for over 70 years. Oh yes, I’ll just bet you remember Eric Linden, all right.
The Hacketts deftly tinkered with the letter of O’Neill’s play, but Ah, Wilderness! the movie remained stoutly faithful to its spirit, and for that, a good share of the credit should go to director Clarence Brown. Brown’s career and work deserve more attention than they’ve gotten, and maybe someday I’ll have more to say about him. For now, I’ll simply observe that in his 53 pictures between 1920 and 1952 he directed a striking number of performers to their best-ever performances: Eric Linden here, Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet, Claude Jarman Jr. in The Yearling, Juano Hernandez in Intruder in the Dust, George Brent in The Rains Came, Marie Dressler in Emma, and so on. An equally striking number gave their near-best for him: Garbo and Basil Rathbone in Anna Karenina, Mickey Rooney and Frank Morgan in The Human Comedy, Charles Boyer in Conquest, Paul Douglas in Angels in the Outfield — well, you get the idea. I could do a whole post just on Brown’s contribution to Ah, Wilderness!, but my topic here is what the picture’s success led to for MGM and Hollywood — consequences beyond what anyone could have expected. Clarence Brown had a lot to do with that success; let’s just leave it at that.
When the picture went into production in the fall of 1936, Aurania Rouverol’s Skidding had a new title, A Family Affair, and George B. Seitz was directing from a script by Kay Van Riper. It reunited a hefty chunk of the cast from Ah, Wilderness!: Lionel Barrymore, Spring Byington, Mickey Rooney, Charles Grapewin. Also back were Eric Linden and Cecilia Parker, romantically paired once again — only this time she was the one in the family and he was the neighboring sweetheart. The picture was shot on the same backlot “New England Street” that had been built for Ah, Wilderness!, and the new family “lived” in the same house. If you have any lingering doubt that this new picture was designed to evoke pleasant memories of the earlier one, here’s the title frame from Ah, Wilderness!…
…and here’s the same frame from A Family Affair. The new picture took place in the “present day” (i.e., 1936) instead of a rose-colored turn of the century, but otherwise it followed the benevolent formula laid down by Eugene O’Neill in his change-of-pace comedy: the friendly, cozy big-small-town where everybody knows everybody else, the close-knit family bound by ties of affection and respect, the periodic heart-to-heart talks between father and son. The family of newspaper publisher Nat Miller in Ah, Wilderness! were the clear progenitors of Judge James K. Hardy and his clan — at least, by the time MGM had brought the Hardys to the screen. (In fact, ironically, Aurania Rouverol’s play had beaten O’Neill’s to Broadway by nearly five-and-a-half years; Skidding had a longer run, too.)
In 1946, the year of the last regular Andy Hardy picture (Love Laughs at Andy Hardy), there was a sort of closing of the circle on Ah, Wilderness! Producer Arthur Freed, still flush from his rousing success with Meet Me in St. Louis (which itself was a very close cousin to Ah, Wilderness!) conceived the idea of turning O’Neill’s play into a musical. So the Hardys moved out of their comfy white house and the Millers moved back in (and painted it yellow for Technicolor), and the result was Summer Holiday. This time Andy Hardy himself, Mickey Rooney (who had played Tommy, the youngest Miller boy, in Ah, Wilderness!), was promoted into the role of Richard Miller, and Richard and his Muriel (Gloria DeHaven) got the top billing (thanks to the Hacketts’ tweakings of O’Neill, here preserved and enhanced) that Eric Linden and Cecilia Parker had deserved but been denied in 1935.
Even by 1948, the “reinventions” — of America and of Ah, Wilderness! — that Mickey Rooney talked about had begun to outstrip Andy Hardy, but Andy cast a long shadow for decades after the series itself ebbed. Sometimes the influence was direct and deliberate, as with the Archie comics that started in 1941 in blatant imitation of Andy Hardy and are still around today. Sometimes it was indirect but distinct, as in TV sitcoms from Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, through The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch, to Eight Is Enough and Modern Family. In them all, we can still discern the basic template with which L.B. Mayer “confected” small-town American life, in MGM’s conscious imitation of the way Eugene O’Neill had “confected” an imaginary youth for himself in New London, Conn. The shadow of Andy Hardy is really the shadow of Ah, Wilderness! (And let’s not forget Meet Me in St. Louis and the Technicolor musicals inspired by it, like Centennial Summer, State Fair, On Moonlight Bay, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, and yes, Summer Holiday, all with a clear kinship to O’Neill’s comedy.)
The 1960s were, in a literal if not a figurative sense, a golden age for movie musicals; they made more money (a total of over $250 million, real money back then — about $2.128 billion today) and won more awards (four best picture Oscars, best director for each one, 34 Oscars in the various craft categories, plus a more-than-respectable smattering of acting awards and nominations) than they ever had before or would again. There were West Side Story, Gypsy, The Music Man, Bye Bye Birdie, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins, Thoroughly Modern Millie, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Half a Sixpence, Funny Girl, Oliver!…
It was in this atmosphere, right smack in the middle of the decade, that Girl Crazy emerged in its third and final screen incarnation. It was planned as a vehicle for pop chanteuse Connie Francis. Her popularity was just beginning to wane under the onslaught of the Beatles-led British Invasion, but we can see that only in retrospect; at the time she seemed as popular as ever. And she was very popular indeed — the first female to have two consecutive number one hits (“Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” and “My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own” in 1960) and the youngest entertainer to headline in Las Vegas and at New York’s Copacabana (that same year). Also in 1960, Francis made her screen debut in MGM’s Where the Boys Are (and had another big hit with the title tune). It was the custom in those days, when a singer had a hit song, to make the follow-up single as much like the hit as possible, so MGM and Francis followed Where the Boys Are with Follow the Boys. And that’s why, when the studio decided to revamp Girl Crazy for Connie Francis, the show got a new title (and a new song for Connie to croon): When the Boys Meet the Girls.
Connie’s co-star was Harve Presnell, a veteran of the opera and concert stage who had made a splash on Broadway in The Unsinkable Molly Brown, then won a Golden Globe for the movie version opposite Debbie Reynolds. At that stage of his career he was tall and handsome, with a lush baritone voice — a slightly younger, blonde version of Howard Keel. But his timing couldn’t have been worse: By 1965 not even Keel was getting enough work to keep him busy; he hadn’t made a musical since Kismet in 1955, and had segued into straight acting roles. Presnell would have a tougher time of that; as a screen actor he was a little stiff, without Keel’s comfort in front of a camera. He made one more major movie, stealing Paint Your Wagon from Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin with his rendition of “They Call the Wind Maria”, then it was back to regional theater and Broadway tours until he returned to movies as a character actor in his 60s and 70s. Things worked better for him then; the stiffness that had looked a bit wooden in his youth seemed more like patrician dignity in his senior years, and he had a distinguished second career in movies (Fargo, Saving Private Ryan, Flags of Our Fathers, Evan Almighty) before dying of pancreatic cancer at 75 in 2009.
But one of Karger’s bright ideas really takes stupidity to undreamed-of heights, and that’s in his treatment of “Bidin’ My Time”. The number is given to Herman’s Hermits, sitting on and around a flatbed truck while the rest of the young cast gets busy building Ginger’s dude ranch. At first things seem to go well with the song: it’s an almost witty idea, handing this lazy cowboy lullaby to these slightly nerdy lads from Manchester. Peter Noone’s wispy tenor voice slides nicely into the verse, then the refrain moves into a ricky-ticky soft-samba rhythm similar to the Beatles’ version of “Till There Was You”. Then, trouble. Now as just about everybody but Fred Karger and Peter Noone knew by 1965, the song is supposed to go like this:
By the time Girl Crazy came to the screen again, Hollywood’s attitude toward musicals had changed diametrically, and with a will. A look at Clive Hirschhorn’s comprehensive coffee-table book 
So let’s recap: After less than two weeks, Girl Crazy was four days behind schedule and 60 grand over budget. Judy Garland was frazzled, Roger Edens was furious. Obviously, Berkeley had to go. Freed removed him from the picture and replaced him with Norman Taurog.
At the risk of becoming monotonous, let us count the ways. First, of course, is that rambunctious version of “Treat Me Rough”, which June Allyson invests with an innocent tomboy eroticism (she’s like a less obnoxious Betty Hutton) that must have had the Hays Office wondering if this sort of thing was really okay, then shrugging and deciding it was all just good clean fun after all.
The quirky love-hate duet “Could You Use Me?” was something that Eddie Quillan and Arline Judge actually might have handled pretty well if RKO had deigned to include it in 1932. But they didn’t, and it was left to Mickey and Judy to bring it to the screen. Filmed in punishing 112-degree heat on location on a desert road outside Palm Springs (with pickup shots in the relative comfort of a soundstage back in Culver City), it’s a cheerful charmer in which Judy manages to suggest that Ginger’s resistance to Danny’s brash advances is already beginning to melt.
“Embraceable You” is presented at a party for Ginger, in a scene that includes the movie’s only non-Gershwin interpolation: a chorus of “Happy Birthday to You” from Cody College’s assembled student body. Judy sings to the boys, then dances with them all, one by one and in groups, with an extended pas de deux with dance director Charles Walters. Later, after graduating to full direction himself, Walters helmed Judy in Easter Parade (’48), Summer Stock (’50), and her triumphant one-woman show at Broadway’s Palace Theatre in 1951.
When Danny Churchill attends a party at the Governor’s Mansion to lobby against the closing of Cody, he meets up with his old pal Tommy Dorsey, and that sets the stage for a nifty piece of Big Band Era history: Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra in a marvelous pop-concert rendition of “Fascinating Rhythm”. It’s a jumpin’ arrangement, and features a solo by “Danny Churchill” on piano. In fact, Mickey Rooney’s playing was dubbed by Arthur Schutt; still, as his keyboard fingering in the scene makes clear, Rooney was an accomplished pianist himself, and to the end of his days he spoke of the thrill of getting to perform “Fascinating Rhythm” with Dorsey and his band. (No doubt, even though the number had been prerecorded on MGM’s music stage, the band — including guest soloist Rooney — played for real on the set.)
That party leads to the inevitable misunderstanding when Ginger believes Danny has returned to his girl-crazy ways with the governor’s daughter (Frances Rafferty). It all gets sorted out in time for a happy ending, natch, but not before Judy Garland gets the opportunity — Hallelujah! — to redeem the tawdry vandalism of “But Not for Me” back in 1932. This is not only the high point of Girl Crazy — it’s the high point of Judy Garland’s entire career. With all due respect to “Over the Rainbow”, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, “The Man That Got Away” or anything else you care to name, this is Judy’s best. Co-star Gil Stratton talked about watching the number being shot and said “it was something you ought to have paid admission to see.” The simplicity of Taurog’s staging, the delicate cinematography of William Daniels, and the combined artistry of Judy and and the Gershwin brothers all fuse into the kind of magic that the Hollywood of 1943 had led audiences to take for granted. Judy Garland was as good as it got, then or ever after, and here’s the proof.
Originally, Girl Crazy was to end with a reprise of “Embraceable You”, Mickey and Judy surrounded by the rest of the cast as the orchestra swells up and out. But Busby Berkeley’s flamboyant staging of “I Got Rhythm”, scheduled to come almost 20 minutes before the end, threatened to turn anything that followed into a dribbling anticlimax. There was some hurried reshuffling of the script and music, and Girl Crazy as it was released on November 26 ended with “I Got Rhythm”. It must have positively galled Roger Edens; he’d gotten his way and had Berkeley canned from the picture, and now here was Berkeley literally getting the last word — cracking whips, blazing six-guns and all. But it was the right call, and, however grudgingly, Edens probably had to admit it.
I have this fantasy in which I imagine that a scout from RKO Radio Pictures early in 1931 is told to go see Girl Crazy on Broadway and to report back about its potential as a movie. In his report, does he say, “The score is amazing; George and Ira Gershwin have written some songs that will be sung as long as singers sing”? Or “This Ethel Merman is dynamite; she electrifies an audience and she can put a song over like an artillery barrage”? Or “Ginger Rogers is a real charmer who has already shown that she photographs well; with care she could be groomed into a major star”? Does he say any of this? He does not. Instead, this brilliant showbiz oracle tells the front office, “This might make a good vehicle for Wheeler and Woolsey.”
Almost a third member of the (not really a) team was diminutive Dorothy Lee; she appeared in 16 of Wheeler and Woolsey’s pictures. A good physical match for Wheeler (he was five foot four, she five foot exactly), Lee served as a romantic partner for him, giving Wheeler (and the audience) a little relief from the obnoxious blowhard Woolsey. So it was in Girl Crazy, in which Wheeler took the role played on Broadway by Willie Howard (whose intransigence had killed the show before its time). The cabbie’s name was de-ethnicized from Gieber Goldfarb to Jimmy Deegan, the character was divested of the comic Yiddish persona that was Howard’s stock in trade, and Lee was brought in as Patsy, “the gal of the golden west”, to duet with Wheeler in one of only four musical numbers in the movie. 
Musicals, a novelty in the late ’20s, had worn out their welcome by 1932 and become a drug on the market; theater owners were known to reassure audiences in ads and posters that their current offering was “Not a Musical!” (The Big Revival over at Warner Bros. was still a year away.) In this atmosphere, no one at RKO was in a mood to look twice at the Gershwins’ songs in Girl Crazy. Instead, taking their cue from Willie Howard and William Kent having been the ones with star billing on Broadway, the studio jettisoned most of the score and refashioned the book — the weakest thing about the show — to suit their hot new team. So it is that in the movie, it isn’t Eddie Quillan’s Danny Churchill who takes a taxi from Manhattan to Arizona, it’s the gambler Slick (new surname: Foster) who hops into Jimmy Deegan’s cab for the trip out west. (The lady in the back seat with Woolsey is Kitty Kelly, playing what’s left of Ethel Merman’s role.) Two huge chunks of the picture’s modest 74-minute running time are eaten up by (1) Wheeler and Woolsey’s misadventures on the road to Arizona and (2) further misadventures later, when the action adjourns to Mexico. 
As for those four songs, only three were from the show. The movie opens promisingly with an amusing, if abbreviated, rendition of “Bidin’ My Time”, with four singing cowboys moseyin’ along on the back of the same overburdened horse, while the camera moves through the Custerville cemetery from the grave of one luckless sheriff to the next, and the next.
A few minutes later comes “You’ve Got What Gets Me” a new song by George and Ira written for the movie. (In point of fact, it wasn’t entirely new; it was a reworking of another song, “Your Eyes, Your Smile”, which had been cut from the Broadway production of Funny Face before it opened in 1927.) This is a light romantic duet between Wheeler and Dorothy Lee (already, as noted, a staple of their pictures together), followed by a sprightly tap dance in which they’re joined by little Mitzi Green as Wheeler’s pesky sister. Toward the end of her life, Dorothy Lee remembered Girl Crazy with bitter disgust as the movie where they photographed her behind a post (“I saw it once,” she said. “I couldn’t look at it again.”), and this frame from the dance shows she wasn’t being hypersensitive — you can just about make out her elbows (she’s dancing to the left of Wheeler). Why would anybody bother to stage a tap dance on a set dominated by an enormous vine-covered wishing well right in the middle of the floor (and seemingly taking up half of it)? It’s hard to comprehend — but then, the songs simply weren’t a priority. 
But, with all due sympathy to Ms. Lee, that’s not the worst. The absolute nadir of RKO’s Girl Crazy — lower than any of Wheeler and Woolsey’s comedy, already too low by half — comes with the disgraceful treatment accorded “But Not for Me”. What on Broadway had been a wistful solo of lost love by Ginger Rogers was revamped as a trio for Eddie Quillan as Danny, Arline Judge as Molly, and Mitzi Green trying to patch things up between them. Ira’s lyric was twisted around to say the exact opposite of what he wrote (“Beatrice Fairfax, don’t you dare/Ever tell me he won’t care…”), and George’s tempo was sped up until the song sounded like the merry-go-round gone wild in Strangers on a Train. Quillan and Judge were hardly singers (which may explain the breakneck tempo, always easier for non-singers to handle), and they rush through the song as if they have to be someplace; Quillan darts off-camera before the music even tinkles to a stop. The song comes off like a playground argument between two petulant kids. It’s followed by a reprise in which Green tries to cheer Judge up by using the song to do impressions (and pretty good ones, too) of Bing Crosby, Roscoe Ates, George Arliss and Edna May Oliver. This plays oddly today, especially with audiences who never heard of Ates, Arliss or Oliver, but at least it had a counterpart in the original show: Willie Howard was famous for his impressions, and the book incorporated them by having the cabbie try to cheer Ginger Rogers’ Molly with a reprise a la Rudy Vallee and Maurice Chevalier — but only after Ginger had already given the song its full soulful due. This movie never bothers to do that.
The following year would come the game-changer: Warner Bros. (and Busby Berkeley) with the spectacular hat trick of 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933 and Footlight Parade to put musicals back in vogue again, where they would remain for decades — even Poverty Row studios like Republic, Monogram and PRC would regularly try their hands at them. But all that came too late to help RKO’s Girl Crazy. It was born before its time; the studio didn’t appreciate the property it had, and didn’t have the wit, confidence or foresight to do what should have been done with it.
This post has grown in the planning, to the point where I’m putting it up in two parts (maybe more; we’ll see how things shake out). I have an epic tale to tell, nothing less than the rise and fall of the Hollywood musical, as reflected in the screen career of a single property: Girl Crazy, the 1930 Broadway hit with songs by George and Ira Gershwin, book by Guy Bolton and John McGowan.
Merman’s debut alone was enough to make Girl Crazy‘s opening a Broadway landmark, but there was more. Others present that night wouldn’t make it big until later, but the fact that they were there at all is enough to make you pray for time travel. For starters, there was the man who put together the pit orchestra: Ernest Loring “Red” Nichols, age 25, one of the busiest musicians in town. He was an accomplished cornetist who could play equally well “hot” and “straight”, and he had already made hundreds of Dixieland recordings for Brunswick Records, usually with an ad hoc band billed as Red Nichols and his Five Pennies.
Playing Girl Crazy‘s lead was 19-year-old Ginger Rogers, fresh from making her Broadway debut in Top Speed and creating a sensation purring “Cigarette me, big boy” in her first movie, Young Man of Manhattan. She had two of Girl Crazy‘s most enduring songs, “Embraceable You” and “But Not for Me”, and by all accounts handled them quite nicely. But lacking what Cole Porter later called Ethel Merman’s “golden foghorn” voice, she had to stand helplessly by while Ethel stole her thunder night after night; it would take the intimacy of the movie camera to coax her star into full bloom. (And here’s a fun fact: During rehearsals one of her dance numbers was not working exactly right, so producers Alex A. Aarons and Vinton Freedley asked a dancing star they knew to step in and refine the choreography as a favor, and he coached Ginger on the routine in the lobby of the Alvin during rehearsals. You guessed it: It was Fred Astaire.)
Act II finds half the population of Custerville in San Luz. Danny finds Molly, bids her farewell and wishes her all the best with Sam; only after he leaves does she realize her true feelings for him, and now she fears the knowledge has come too late. But when she learns that Sam has registered them at the local hotel as husband and wife, she realizes what a cad he is and runs to Danny’s arms. Outraged, Danny blurts a threat against Sam that returns to bite him when Sam is assaulted and robbed and Danny is accused of the crime. Meanwhile, Kate confronts her cheating husband. Eventually — jeez, let’s cut to the chase — Gieber exposes Lank and his henchman Pete as the men who robbed Sam, Kate and Slick reconcile, Danny and Molly are reunited, and everybody presumably lives happily ever after back in Custerville.