Summer Under the Stars is back! TCM’s annual celebration of classic Hollywood features a slew of entertaining pictures with some of the biggest and brightest names. Musical-wise, your best bets are to keep an eye on August 4 (Judy Garland), August 25 (Dick Powell), and August 30 (Betty Grable). But the whole months is full of wonderful treats!
Few other performers can claim the title of “triple threat” so handily as Gene Kelly did with MGM in the 1940s and ’50s as an actor, a singer, and, of course, a dancer. But his career wasn’t limited to only those three titles; throughout the course of his professional life, he was also a producer, a director, a writer, a choreographer, and, all the while, an athlete. For a studio that claimed “more stars than there are in heaven,” Kelly was one of their brightest, an indelible association with the genre MGM took to new heights: the movie musical.
Somehow, throughout these last four days, time had continued progressing in a forward motion to the point that we now reached the LAST day of TCM Fest, a thought that seemed unimaginable on Thursday, or even still today. But we festival-goers now faced that terrible chasm of darkness after Sunday evening, determined to make the best of our final …
The Hollywood Reporter reports that all three of Judy Garland’s children—Liza Minnelli, Lorna Luft, and Joseph Luft—will be on hand at this year’s Oscar ceremony to pay tribute to their late mother, on the 75th anniversary of her iconic performance in The Wizard of Oz.
While I’m never really expecting to see Judy Garland involved in a bar brawl, or threateningly brandishing a pistol in each hand, I really wasn’t expecting to see it happen in The Harvey Girls, a wholesome 1946 musical based on the true story of a restauranteur’s trainside western empire. But that’s what happened, and I’m glad it did—as little surprises like this were part of what made the film charming, if a little creaky, to behold.
“Every Sunday” is another of the shorts featured in Judy Garland section of That’s Entertainment, and it’s a sweet, charming MGM short film… which also belies a slightly more intriguing intent from the studio perspective.