Judging by its lofty pedigree on paper, For Me and My Gal should really be one of cinema’s most enduring and classic musicals. Not only was it directed by Busby Berkeley and produced by Arthur Freed, but it was Judy Garland’s first “adult” role, and, furthermore, Gene Kelly’s film debut. And yet it remains one of the more underseen Garland and/or Kelly and/or Berkeley pictures of the era, in part because, well… it’s a bit dark.
MGM golden girl Joan Crawford is to thank for a number of uncommon treats airing on TCM this month, including, happily, a rare film featured in That’s Entertainment:The Hollywood Revue of 1929. This film is most notable for being the first onscreen depiction of the now-classic “Singing in the Rain,” but there’s a LOT of other things going on in here as well… and the lack of focus, in turn, is probably why it’s not been seen more widely.
This was a great year in vintage film for me, with my That’s Entertainment project starting at the beginning of 2013, and The Vintage Cameo starting in May, so I thought I’d go through and pull together a list of some of my favorite older movies I saw for the first time this year. I chose one for each month to cultivate some sense of order, and to restrict me from just talking about all the new Gene Kelly movies I saw.
As my New Year’s resolution, I’m newly committed to finishing my That’s Entertainment project (that is, watching the original, full-length films from which That’s Entertainment was compiled). I’m down to 23, 8 of which are available on DVD from Netflix; 4 of which are currently rentable on Warner Archive Instant; and 4 more of which will be airing on TCM in the next couple months. Considering for a bit of overlap in those categories, that leaves only 8 unaccounted for, but I’ll start with those first 15.
Bachelor Mother is another one of those great time-capsule movies that communicates much more to a modern viewer than just its plot. It’s a light, charming comedy from 1939, starring Ginger Rogers, and pretty much right from the start, the concept of the situation completely and utterly reflects its era. Rogers plays a shopgirl at Merlin’s department store …
Holiday Inn, the 1942 musical that teamed up Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire for the first time, is… mostly a Christmas movie. It begins and ends at Christmas, of course, and won an Oscar for spawning the classic song, “White Christmas”–which later became a star on its own, in the sort-of-sequel, sort-of-remake, White Christmas, as well as holding the record as the best-selling song for over 50 years. But Holiday Inn was never designed to be a vehicle for delivering Christmas songs unto a willing audience. Rather, the point was to cover a whole range of holidays throughout the year, from New Year’s Day to New Year’s Eve, and allow people to accent nearly every moment of their life with a specialized Irving Berlin song. (People at this time already had “God Bless America,” but were sadly lacking any Berlin tunes to play for Thanksgiving, Washington’s Birthday, or many other holidays.) So, though I’m comfortable calling it a Christmas movie, it is a bit of an accidental Christmas movie.