I belong to the last (or so) generation of people who had all story and character elements of The Wizard of Oz poured into their cultural consciousness thanks to that film’s ubiquity on network television. By the time I was 12, I had it on videocassette and could watch it whenever I felt like it, which really exploded my brain. However, in the years between the first time I saw it and when I got the 50th anniversary edition VHS (complete with deleted scenes and a making-of documentary, oh my!), every year felt longer and longer as I waited for the annual broadcast, spending a ridiculous amount of time thinking about Oz and its delights in the meantime.
I very clearly remember the first time I saw Oz: I was 4 or 5 years old, and I thought that Dorothy was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. I knew I loved her and I didn’t know why. Lea DeLaria once joked that being gay is genetic and that Elizabeth Taylor is the gene. I would eventually expand that definition to shove Judy Garland into the DNA strand along with her. The main reason that I remember the first time I watched The Wizard of Oz is that I didn’t finish it. At the point at which Dorothy is trapped in the Witch’s castle and is crying because she wants to go home, I found myself so broken up over this girl that I loved so instinctively, so deeply, that I, for the first and only time in my pre-adult life, sent myself to bed. That was the only time I didn’t watch the entire film. A year later, I was sure I could handle the whole thing. The Wizard of Oz then became the only movie that mattered to me for a very long time.
Judy Garland ended up being my gateway drug to what we at fancy parties call cinema. Once I realized I was as obsessed with her as I was with Oz, I began to seek out her other films. Between the fact that, for some reason, YTV played them all on repeat and that the Toronto Public Library had newly begun renting out videocassettes, and most of its selection was classics, I managed to get through much of Garland’s MGM filmography. In doing so, I fell in love with Hollywood movies from the 1940s (still, by the way, my favourite period for Hollywood cinema). From there, I became passionate about movie history while still remaining focused on Garland herself, reading a number of biographies and learning about a life that has now passed into legend as both triumph and tragedy.
From Frances to Judy
The biographical details are familiar to just about everyone who knows anything about Judy Garland (and if they’re not, they’re homophobic). The story is a classic litany of child star and tragic torch singer clichés that Garland inadvertently helped originate. She was born (possibly in a trunk) just over a century ago on June 10, 1922 in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, as Frances Ethel Gumm. She was the daughter of vaudevillians who took over running a movie theatre to raise their children and join respectable suburban life, first in the town of her birth and later in Lancaster, California after gossip about Father Gumm’s affairs with young men got a bit too noisy. As was common at the time, movie audiences were frequently treated to live performances between shows. “The Gumm Sisters,” with Mary Jane and Dorothy Virginia, were a regular stage act thanks to prodding from their ambitious mother, a woman whom Judy later called the “Real Wicked Witch of the West” and who has been recorded in film history for being as evil in Stage Motherhood as the women who birthed Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood. A survey of Garland’s biographies finds that her mother was actually somewhere in the middle between Margaret Hamilton’s famous caricature as the Wicked Witch of the West and the kind of practical, tough decision-maker that we usually only accept in fathers. She made Judy get an abortion during her first marriage to save her career as a teen idol, but she also knew what a chance her daughter had to get ahead of everyone else during the Great Depression. From her perspective, she was giving Judy the tools to be a success.
Legend has it that little Frances Ethel could be heard at the back of the auditorium singing “Jingle Bells” when she was merely five or six years old. Before long, the sister act was renamed the Garland sisters and made a bid for Hollywood, with the youngest given the adorable name of Judy. She eventually caught the eye of MGM talent scouts who put her on the studio payroll, effectively making her the breadwinner for her family at the ripe old age of 13. Her rise to fame coincided with the early death of her father (from meningitis) and Garland always considered him the only person in her life who loved her without demanding something back. The feeling was helped, no doubt, by the fact that he died before she ever had much to give him, and which also allowed Garland to cast her mother in an even more negative light.
For a long time, the studio didn’t know what to do with her and didn’t put her in a film until well over a year later, confused as to how to sell a gal who was cute but not glamorous enough, not a child and not yet an adult. Without a doubt, Garland was supremely talented (she was famous for most of her life for being able to memorize songs and dialogue after only hearing them once), but she was in possession of a depth of spirit that didn’t match her age. In her earliest roles, she was often sold as the hip and modern kid, frequently set against a classical operatic singer (Deanna Durbin, in one case), not the polished performer but certainly the one you could relate to, although it’s a stretch to say that a woman with such magnificent vocal talent could be relatable to any mere human.
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Oz, released in 1939 and filmed when Garland was only sixteen years old, is of course the film that made her a household name. In it, she plays one of the most familiar film characters in history, but it’s also the film that represents the beginning of a gruelling decade for Garland, whose personal woes were without a doubt the result of her time at MGM. Overwhelmingly popular with audiences (which she remained, regardless of her off-stage difficulties, until the day she died and beyond), she was beset by insecurities about her appearance that were exasperated by a studio system that labelled every flaw and demanded its removal for the sake of ticket sales. In her first film appearances, she was given removable capped teeth, had rubber discs shoved up her nose to make it look perkier and more “girlish,” and was put on an alarmingly severe diet that involved little food and a lot of amphetamines. She was often filming more than one role at a time and was given as many drugs to sleep as she was to wake up. At the same time, she was astonishingly maintaining a recording career (in those days the commercially sold movie songs were a separate contract) and making appearances on the radio (her favourite of all her tasks, as it didn’t require her to worry about how she looked).
The groundwork had been laid for addiction as well as an inability to separate the personal from the professional. Starting in the mid-1940s when she was at her most bankable as an actress (often inspiring audiences to applaud at the end of her numbers as if she was performing live), Garland began exhibiting the behaviour that would mark the rest of her career. She would go AWOL from the set, show up late, if at all, and drive up the budgets of her films due to delays. It sounds preposterous now to believe that anyone that successful could be so unprofessional and not go down in infamy. However, it seems as if the people who were most enraged by her behaviour also had a fondness for the vulnerability they saw at the heart of it. It’s even more likely that, for Garland, life at MGM was like being at a strict private school and her behaviour was that of a rebellious misfit.
Judy, the Movie Star
On screen, she was ripening as a performer, particularly after an acting breakthrough with Vincente Minnelli in Meet Me in St. Louis that introduced her to the second of five husbands (and the first of two gay husbands). The film also brought her to makeup artist Dottie Penedel, who removed the discs from her nose and gave her a mature look that made Garland enjoy watching herself on screen for the first time ever. If you’re going to watch anything about Garland’s life, skip the enjoyable but strangely anachronistic Renée Zellweger biopic and go for Robert Alan Ackerman’s 2001 miniseries Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows. The scene in which she first sees herself in Meet Me in St. Louis is one of the most powerful scenes — and is more or less the point at which Judy Davis takes over for an uncannily exact Tammy Blanchard.
Off screen, however, Garland’s reliance on prescription painkillers and alcohol was worsening. Her weight would go from pudgy to rail thin and back with alarming speed, and her bosses were losing their patience with habits that they had fostered for their own profit. (Profits which they continued to make and which she never really benefited from.) Once the East Coast money men threw out the studio heads, Garland’s contract was torn up during the problematic production of Annie Get Your Gun (which would eventually be filmed with Betty Hutton). She needed to dry out in rehab, but Louis B. Mayer, the man who famously made his actresses sit on his lap during business meetings, had been ousted and had no power to pay for it, as he would have in the past. He later claimed that he wanted to help with Garland’s care, and that firing her was the result of his hand being forced.
The Best of Judy
From that point on, Garland’s career was a complicated success, and it’s a shame that Criterion’s collection marking her centenary, which includes the serendipity of her birthday being during Pride Month, doesn’t quite capture the entirety of her film work. The collection’s twelve films only come from the MGM archive and, in an ironic twist, Oz isn’t among them. Of the seven times that she had a film in the year’s top ten box office between 1939 and 1950, four of them are included here.
Even more egregious than the absent Oz, however, is that the collection doesn’t feature her greatest triumph: the second (and for my money, the best) official version of A Star Is Born, for which she received her first Oscar nomination, and which was her first film after the end of her rule at MGM four years earlier. There is enough ink spilled over Garland losing the Oscar to Grace Kelly (for The Country Girl) to drown all five of that year’s nominees. Most of the theorizing is focused on the Academy either wanting to give the “it girl” Kelly an early wedding present before she was minted Princess of Monaco a year later, or (more likely) succumbing to their penchant for rewarding pretty girls who play dowdy (she does wears glasses in the film, after all). Such musings are perfectly cogent, but it’s also worth mentioning that A Star Is Born was another film hampered by Judy-related delays. Her self-doubt helped swell a budget that her untried producer husband (Sid Luft, number three and the one who lasted longest) couldn’t handle, necessitating that almost an hour be cut from the finished film after the initial success of its road-show presentation. A hampered film (which didn’t receive a Best Picture nomination, an oddity for a grand epic of its kind) made independently and released by a studio (Warner Bros) that did not have the star under contract didn’t have much of a chance at an awards banquet where studios do all the campaigning, and their employees do most of the voting.
A Star Is Born captured all aspects of Garland’s performance skills, the little girl who broke hearts singing torch songs when she was a child now had a throaty, mature sound that matched her command in front of a camera. However, losing the award was also a perfect summation of her inability to succeed in the business side of show biz the way she did with the show part itself. In the coming years, some of Broadway’s greatest musical plays were written with her in mind (Gypsy being the best example, particularly with her stage-mother background in mind) but no one could count on her to show up every night of the run. The parts were rarely even offered to her once the shows were ready to be mounted. On the one season of her variety program The Judy Garland Show (1963-1964), dress rehearsals were usually filmed as a way to make sure the network had something to air, in case things didn’t go as planned.
Judy and her Shadows
Garland’s biographers tend to fall into one of two habits when detailing her tumultuous life. Books about her either take a tough love approach by combing through every sordid detail, or they present a Little Girl Lost tragic fantasy. Her daughter Lorna Luft has expressed dismay at the latter attitude in the past, stating that in focusing on the bad stuff, people tend to forget that her mother brought a lot of joy and happiness to her audience. Garland loved performing even though the adoration of the crowd could never translate to as much care and affection at home. In reality, one can’t exist without the other in Garland’s case, so much of her triumph was the result of us knowing what she went through and survived. By omitting her life outside the MGM years, Criterion isn’t paying a robust enough tribute to her accomplishments (admittedly this is the result of licensing woes of which I know nothing, but the result is what it is all the same).
Garland received her second Oscar nomination for Judgment at Nuremberg and made the surprising career move of being directed by John Cassavetes in A Child Is Waiting. These two performances are inspiring for the depth she shows without the aid of a musical score. The majority of the back half of her short life, however, was taken up with live performances that resulted in one of the finest concert careers of the twentieth century (and, in the case of her Carnegie Hall performance, one of the finest live concert albums ever recorded). She made her final film, I Could Go on Singing, in 1963. Despite selling out concert halls all over the world, it played to empty theatres and today is notable mainly for its position at the end of her film career (and as such should also be in this collection). It would be six years before her ridiculously early death at the age of 47, her face and body showing the wear and tear of a life lived swimming constantly upstream. Her financial situation never found any resolve after her studio days ended. The mismanagement of husbands and agents drove her into debt and she died owing four million dollars to the tax bureau. She also died being loved by the crowds who adored her from the very beginning, who like me saw on that stage, at Carnegie Hall and elsewhere, the little girl trapped in a castle who wanted to go home to the motherly bosom of her Aunt Em, pitying her but also sharing her longing.
Famously, Judy Garland’s June 27, 1969 funeral coincided with the Stonewall riots in New York City that, for most social historians, marked the turning point in gay rights history. Television repeats of The Wizard of Oz began in the 1950s and created an enduring legacy for the film that outdid its original release while turning its star into a household name for what seems like the rest of recorded time. As for me, who once stood in a record store with a dad who had no idea why I wanted him to buy me CDs of dead singers’ music, looking like he’d given up hope that we’d ever have much in common, I can watch the whole film without needing to go to bed now. But I still have a pang when I see my genetic ancestor crying alone in that castle, and I remember what it was like to watch movies with a sense of longing and wonder.
The Judy Garland Collection
Films are reviewed in order of preference, from most to least. All reviews by Bil Antoniou except, where noted, by Emma Badame.
Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944)
Emma Badame: This charmingly colourful MGM musical–and perennial Christmas favourite–showcases Garland at her absolute best. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, who went on to become the actress’s second husband, the commercially and critically-successful film follows one loving St. Louis family through life’s trials and tribulations as they await the 1904 World’s Fair. The familial relationships are simple but heartfelt, and what could’ve been a trite slice of turn-of-the-century Americana is elevated by wonderful performances by Garland, Margaret O’Brien, Mary Astor, and Harry Davenport, to name just a few. Best known for introducing audiences to three stellar standards (The Trolley Song, The Boy Next Door and the moving Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas), the 1944 classic gives Garland a chance to sing, dance and charm everyone from the actual boy next door (Tom Drake) to the most reluctant of moviegoers. She shines in Irene Sharaff’s gorgeous costumes and brings a perfect lightness of touch to the film’s humour and a real depth to its drama. Don’t wait until the holidays to enjoy Meet Me in St. Louis–it’s a perfect choice all year ‘round.
Easter Parade (Charles Walters, 1948)
Every film in this collection is one that I watched repeatedly as a teenager. This one is among the few that still has the energy and brightness that it did the first time I saw it. The biggest moneymaker for MGM that year, Easter Parade stars Fred Astaire as a famous hoofer whose double act with Ann Miller breaks up when she decides to strike out on her own. Wanting to prove that he can turn anyone into a partner as good as his ex, Astaire picks up a singer (Garland) who is performing in a cheap diner and classes her up until they’re the toast of the town, but her burgeoning feelings for him complicate matters (and it’s to Garland’s credit that she convinces us that she could leave dewy young Peter Lawford in the cold for the nearly 50-year-old Astaire, who was only ever a theoretical lover, even in his youth). Director Charles Walters has the best rapport with Garland of any of her directors besides Minnelli. Both her verve as a performer and her sincerity as an actor feel effortless and enchanting. Walters’ embraces the film’s incredibly uncomplicated plot, which allows each scene to move smoothly through the barebones screenplay and highlight the overwhelming series of superb musical numbers. The songs by Irving Berlin that dominate the score include the title tune, I Want to Go Back To Michigan, and the Couple of Swells number that would later inspire Garland’s street tramp persona in her concerts.
The Clock (Vincente Minnelli, 1945)
Emma Badame: This lesser-known war-time romance marked the first time Garland took the lead in a dramatic, non-musical picture. She fought with the studio for a chance to flex her acting muscles and, although The Clock only achieved limited success, most contemporary critics agreed that Garland displayed the necessary chops for the transition from musical star to a quote-unquote serious actress. Taking place over two days at the height of World War II, the 1945 flick follows soldier Joe Allen (Robert Walker) on his two-day leave in New York City. While making his way through the war-time crowds at Penn Station, he quite literally bumps into Alice Mayberry (Garland) and they hit it off, finding a touching pocket of normalcy amid the chaos around them. It’s a quiet story that impresses with its simplicity and with its two excellent leading performances. And for Garland, it was a giant step forward in an already impressive career–a sign of bigger and even better things to come.
The Harvey Girls (George Sidney, 1946)
No one needed a film about the waitresses who tamed the Southwest. In reality, it was just one part of hospitality pioneer Fred Harvey’s business empire. But the opening dedication of this film seems to equate their story with the importance of an Abraham Lincoln biopic. The studio initially conceived the project as a drama for Lana Turner until the Broadway success of Oklahoma convinced them to turn it into a musical, wooing Garland away from Minnelli’s Yolanda and the Thief to take on the lead role. Unlike earlier films in which her musical numbers are often diegetic performances with a band or a record player nearby, this film’s brilliant score comes very close to recreating Rodgers and Hammerstein’s revolutionary patter-singing. Garland weaves seamlessly between song and speech as a mail-order bride who arrives in a desert town, before becoming a Harvey girl when that plan goes bust. Angela Lansbury plays a saloon gal who has seen it all at the ripe old age of 20 (and her singing is dubbed), and John Hodiak is the soulless saloon owner who tries to drive the wholesome restaurant out of town until our heroine wins his heart. One of the studio’s best musicals of the decade, its magnificent slate of songs includes the Oscar-winning On the Atchison Topeka and the Santa Fe, which ranks among her most impressive production numbers.
Girl Crazy (Norman Taurog, 1943)
Busby Berkeley was set to direct this ninth pairing of Garland and Rooney but was fired for both his overly elaborate production spending and, with Garland’s increased star power giving her more influence over her projects, because she didn’t want to work with the man who bullied her anymore. His I Got Rhythm sequence remains in the finale, but the rest of the film shows Garland at her most natural and sincere since Oz. When she laughs both with and at Rooney’s follies, it feels genuine. For the first time, audiences got to see how well she handled sassy humour. Rooney plays a wealthy Manhattan playboy whose exasperated father decides to send him to an all-male college out west, thinking it will get him to stop wasting his time and money on women, but doesn’t reckon on the college dean having a gorgeous granddaughter (Garland). The plot of Guy Bolton and Jack McGowan’s play has been massively rewritten but a number of Gershwin’s songs remain and rank among Garland’s best on film, including Embraceable You, Bidin’ My Time and But Not for Me. This film, which unfortunately coincided with Garland’s increasing habit of being a late or no-show on the set, was the last time she and Rooney would star together. Their tenth and final pairing came five years later as a cameo in the musical biopic Words and Music.
For Me and My Gal (Busby Berkeley, 1942)
This World War II morale booster, the first time Judy Garland was billed alone above the title, makes the barest effort to pass itself off as vaudeville nostalgia set during the first World War. The star is given a bit more drama to work with, though with the still tyrannical Busby Berkeley behind the camera, you can see her stiffening up into mannered emotions whenever the scene requires her to go deeper. Critics balked at the possibility of taking her seriously as an actress but no one could deny the appeal of her numbers in the Oscar-nominated score. Newcomer Gene Kelly, meanwhile, shines as the song-and-dance man who wins her heart but whose desire to get ahead in show business breaks it. The title tune and After You’ve Gone are two of the film’s sterling classics that would later make their way into Garland’s concert performances.
In the Good Old Summertime (Robert Z. Leonard, 1949)
Sweet, anodyne nostalgia was a frequent preoccupation of MGM’s biggest budgeted musicals. This one is among the most pleasant. It’s remade from Ernst Lubitsch‘s The Shop Around the Corner, but with songs added and dark edges removed. Garland and Van Johnson are perpetually bickering employees of a turn of the century Chicago music store who have no idea that they are also the recipients of the love letters they have both been writing to secret admirers. There’s a side plot with S.Z. Sakall as the store’s proprietor who can’t face the fact that he’s terrible at playing the violin (instead of his dealing with a treacherous thieving employee, as was the case in the original film). Buster Keaton has a few solid moments in a late-career role, but the film belongs to its leading lady, whose musical performances elevate an otherwise pleasant if unremarkable effort. The role itself doesn’t challenge her much, and the film’s period details are laughable, but no one could blame an audience for packing the aisles to watch her sing Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland, Put Your Arms Around Me Honey and I Don’t Care.
Summer Stock (Charles Walters, 1950)
If you’re only watching this one for its most famous number, it’s well worth it, although don’t be surprised to find yourself appalled that Garland’s last completed film under her MGM contract would be made from such flimsy material. A superb director, a top flight cast, gorgeous cinematography and a few genuinely solid musical numbers can’t hide the fact that the screenplay is a tired patchwork of old clichés (most of them from Garland’s earlier films), but they can at least make them go down smoothly. Garland plays a small town New England farmer whose sister (Gloria DeHaven) brings a theatrical troupe to put on a show in their barn without having cleared it with her first. Garland is appalled at the appearance of all these scandalous show people, but decides for her sister’s sake to let them stay on the condition that they also help out with running the farm. No surprise that the troupe’s handsome hoofing leader (Gene Kelly) notices that his hostess can also tap out a few steps and a hum a few tunes in key, but that’s not nearly as annoying to the cynical modern viewer as the fact that the entire cast of actors are cruelly selfish idiots who deserve a pitchfork in the face. The fact that Garland looks much older than her twenty-eight years in a film that she could barely get away with as a teenager only makes Summer Stock look doubly ridiculous. However, director Walters once again keeps his mind on the music and, because of this, much of it is to be cherished. Kelly (who is approaching the height of his fame and was certainly at the height of his good looks) performs a magnificent solo routine with a newspaper. He and Garland do some marvellous dancing together and she, of course, hits paydirt with her solos Friendly Star and the song that would become a staple in her later concerts, Get Happy (the sequence was shot a few months after principal photography, in case you noticed the crash diet she went on in the time between).
The Pirate (Vincente Minnelli, 1948)
The same year Judy Garland triumphed in Easter Parade, she also had one of her biggest bombs with this Vincente Minnelli misfire. The Pirate features her and the rest of the white cast painted a darker shade to play Spanish colonists on a Caribbean island. Her Manuela is betrothed to the blubbery mayor of their town (Walter Slezak), but she daydreams about being kidnapped by the famed pirate Macoco, which she reveals without realizing to a traveling player (Gene Kelly). He then pretends to be the famed outlaw in order to win her heart. The colour cinematography is one of the finest examples of Minnelli’s pictorial command, and Kelly’s thighs in those tights can still overheat the film projector. The film nevertheless suffers from a constant ambivalence over its tone, played with the sincerity of a children’s fairy tale but using a slate of lesser-quality songs by Cole Porter that wink ironically to a grown audience. Garland’s performance, which seems like it is constantly suppressing her naturally sarcastic humour, comes off deeply confused in spirit. Even though her life behind-the-scenes was in constant turmoil (in this case, she was working too soon after the birth of her daughter Liza and showing increased reliance on prescription medication), she doesn’t sing a wrong note or make a bad step.
Ziegfeld Girl (Robert Z. Leonard, 1941)
MGM attempts something of a musical version of Stage Door in this melodrama set amid the love lives of three girls who make it into the Ziegfeld Follies. Hedy Lamarr estranges her lover when she gets hired as a glamour girl on stage and he refuses to slum it in the orchestra. Lana Turner becomes a huge star who moves into a penthouse apartment and leaves behind her faithful trucker boyfriend James Stewart, but then flies too close to the sun and succumbs to alcoholism and despair. Garland is, as always, the plucky good girl who sings her heart out for the love of her aging vaudeville father while being romanced by boyish Jackie Cooper. Lamarr looks bored (she would cure that boredom a year later when she more or less invented Wi-Fi and helped win the war), and Turner can’t help but reveal the machinations of her dramatic elocution lessons. Garland, however, projects real sincerity despite being undermined as the “plain” one among these hot babes. A few numbers are lovely but only Garland’s Minnie from Trinidad is particularly memorable. Otherwise, it’s a bloated slog at two and a quarter hours that ends with MGM busting out that garish old wedding cake from the 1936 Oscar-winning The Great Ziegfeld.
Babes in Arms (Busby Berkeley, 1939)
Emma Badame: Busby Berkeley’s first feature musical at MGM saw Judy pair up with Mickey Rooney for just the second time, following 1938’s Love Finds Andy Hardy, and would go on to star in 10 movies total together. This coming-of-age musical was loosely based on the popular Rodgers and Hart’s Broadway show, but by the time Hollywood was through with the material, almost all of the original songs had been thrown out. Both versions follow a group of young talents trying to prove their parents wrong by actually succeeding on the Great White Way. Coming directly on the heels of The Wizard of Oz‘s production schedule, Garland completed filming Babes in Arms before the former was released. Thanks to the success of both pictures, the star was about to experience a meteoric rise to the very top of her profession. For that reason alone, the film is an enjoyable romp with catchy musical numbers that allows you a peek at a superstar before she became a household name.
Presenting Lily Mars (Norman Taurog, 1943)
Likely the worst movie Judy Garlandever starred in during her tenure at MGM, this silly musical also represents her at her busiest (and overworked), shot almost simultaneously with Girl Crazy plus a cameo in Thousands Cheer during its filming dates. She plays a stagestruck teenager who pursues a popular Broadway producer (Van Heflin) from their mutual Indiana town to New York City where she pesters him until he gives her a chance to shine. An adorable story for anyone who will fall for it, including the ludicrous idea that Garland’s jazzy popular singing would ever be hired to stand in for Martha Eggerth’s operatic crooning. A hastily re-shot ending feels tacked on for no reason, and unlike most of her films at the studio, which even at their worst have at least one song worth remembering, this one has no standout solos. Garland’s duet with Connie Gilchrist doing Ev’ry Little Movement, however, is lovely.
