CMBA Blogathon: THE HARVEY GIRLS (1946)

The theme for this year's CMBA Blogathon is "Planes, Trains, & Automobiles," which makes the 1946 musical, The Harvey Girls, an obvious choice. The movie won an Oscar for its train themed song, "On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe," and it depicts, in a fictionalized and colorful way, the importance of the train in bringing women to the American West. Adapted from a novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams, The Harvey Girls stars Judy Garland, Cyd Charisse, and Virginia O'Brien as three young women who head West on the train to find new opportunities and romance. While it's not a perfect picture, this is a fun, lively musical that tells an often unknown story about women's part in settling the frontier, made even more entertaining by the presence of outstanding actors like Angela Lansbury, Marjorie Main, Ray Bolger, and John Hodiak.

The Harvey Girls were real people; these young women went West to staff the Harvey Houses that sprang up along the railroad lines in the late 19th century. Fred Harvey recruited young women with good backgrounds and civilized manners to work in his establishments, where train passengers found a short rest and a good meal during their stops. For women of that time, there were few respectable job opportunities out West, but the Harvey Houses provided good wages along with room and board. The crisp uniforms and cheerful manners of the Harvey Girls brought a wholesome, civilized femininity to rough country, and their presence helped to tame wild frontier towns. One notable Harvey House location was the Grand Canyon, where the Fred Harvey Company provided concessions and visitor services until 1968. Today, the El Tovar Hotel at the South Rim includes a display honoring the Harvey Girls and the 1946 film tribute to their legacy. Becoming a Harvey Girl changed the lives of many women who yearned for independence and adventure. Over 100,000 young women took the opportunity that the Harvey Houses offered, and you can learn more about their stories by watching the trailer for the 2013 documentary film, The Harvey Girls: Opportunity Bound.

In the movie, Judy Garland's character, Susan, doesn't set out to be a Harvey Girl at all. She responds to a call for a mail-order bride, but when she meets the intended groom (Chill Wills) she jumps at the chance to become a Harvey Girl like the other young women on her train. Marjorie Main plays a funny but effective chaperone and manager for the young ladies in her charge, while Cyd Charisse and Virginia O'Brien appear as two Harvey Girls who befriend Susan. The girls encounter a different type of Western womanhood in Angela Lansbury's saloon singer, Em, who doesn't appreciate the competition or the straitlaced morality of the new arrivals. Susan attracts the interest of the bar's owner, Ned Trent (John Hodiak), while Virginia O'Brien's character, Alma, engages in an awkward but entertaining romance with Chris (Ray Bolger). Sadly, O'Brien disappears from the movie in the third act, thanks to shooting delays that made her pregnancy impossible to hide, but she does get in a particularly funny performance with the song, "The Wild, Wild West."

If The Harvey Girls romanticizes the real experiences of the women who staffed the restaurants on the Santa Fe lines, it also depicts women as individuals who went West for many reasons, and not just as daughters, wives, or prostitutes. Women's Westerns have been few and far between in Hollywood history, but when they do come along they reveal fascinating hints at stories that have largely been left untold. As a musical comedy, The Harvey Girls is lighter and sweeter than Westward the Women (1951) or cattle queen dramas like The Furies (1950) and Johnny Guitar (1954), but it does a great job leaving the viewer wanting to know more about the real women who took that chance for a new life out West. Trains made Harvey Houses necessary, and Harvey Houses made a place for young women to earn a living and lead independent lives. That's a theme worth singing about!

You can find a full-length review of The Harvey Girls in my book, Beyond Casablanca: 100 Classic Movies Worth Watching, available on Kindle at Amazon.com. For more about The Harvey Girls, try the 1994 book by Lesley Poling-Kempes, The Harvey Girls: Women Who Opened the West.

Classic Films in Focus: THE GREAT ZIEGFELD (1936)

Directed by Robert Z. Leonard, The Great Ziegfeld (1936) is a lavish musical tribute to the legendary Broadway producer, with all the whistles, bells, and gorgeous girls that Ziegfeld himself could want, even if it does takes certain liberties with the facts of Ziegfeld’s life. Hollywood had an ongoing fascination with the Ziegfeld legacy, as films like Ziegfeld Girl (1941) and Ziegfeld Follies (1945) attest, so it’s no surprise that a biopic about the showman’s ups and downs would appeal, and, indeed, the film won three Oscars in 1937, including Best Picture. Today, Oscar fans trying to see every Best Picture winner are probably the most likely viewers of this stylish but overly long production, along with William Powell devotees and those with a nostalgic interest in Ziegfeld himself.

Powell stars as the ambitious Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., who rises from promoting a sideshow strongman to producing some of the biggest shows ever seen on the Broadway stage. He constantly steals acts and borrows money from his friendly rival, Jack Billings (Frank Morgan), including the lovely singer, Anna Held (Luise Rainer), who becomes Ziegfeld’s first wife. His enthusiasm for his lady performers brings disaster to the marriage even as the shows themselves become hits, and Anna, heartbroken, divorces Ziegfeld and then loses him for good to second wife, Billie Burke (Myrna Loy). Billie stands by her husband through successes and failures, but the arrival of the Great Depression proves too much for the weary, aging producer.

Ziegfeld had been dead for only four years when the picture came out, but Billie Burke was still very much alive and interested in preserving a certain version of her late husband’s story. Ironically, the greater part of the romantic plot involves Anna and not Billie, although Anna had been dead since 1918. As with most classic Hollywood biopics, this one simplifies, elides, or simply lies about various aspects of the story, but the tragic cast of Anna’s relationship with Ziegfeld is one of the movie’s strongest points, thanks primarily to the Oscar-winning performance of Luise Rainer, who invests her character with great pathos and a birdlike fragility. Myrna Loy, who gets second billing as Billie, doesn’t actually show up until two hours in, leaving her with little time to develop her role beyond a montage of Ziegfeld family moments.

In addition to Powell, Loy, and Rainer, star watchers will find plenty of familiar faces in the movie’s large cast. Fanny Brice and Ray Bolger play themselves as members of the stage company, with Brice performing a portion of her famous “My Man” number and doing a bit of her signature comedy schtick. Frank Morgan enjoys quite a good role as Billings, and of course he’s a natural for the part of a bombastic showman, here warming up for his iconic turn as the title swindler in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Virginia Bruce has some memorable scenes as drunken starlet Audrey Dane, and Nat Pendleton is fun as the muscle-flexing Sandow. Sharp-eyed viewers will catch William Demarest, Dennis Morgan, and Reginald Owen making appearances, along with a bevy of beauties playing Ziegfeld girls (see if you can spot Lynn Bari and future First Lady Pat Nixon). Both Eddie Cantor and Will Rogers are impersonated by other actors; Rogers had died in 1935, but the real Cantor was still alive and well, and he even starred in Strike Me Pink the same year The Great Ziegfeld appeared.

Including its three wins, The Great Ziegfeld earned a total of seven Oscar nominations. Robert Z. Leonard went on to direct Pride and Prejudice (1940), Ziegfeld Girl (1941), and In the Good Old Summertime (1949). Powell and Loy have more memorable pairings in The Thin Man (1934) and its many sequels, as well as in Libeled Lady (1936). Luise Rainer won a second Best Actress Oscar the next year for The Good Earth (1937); as of August 2013 she is still living and at the age of 103 is truly an amazing example of graceful longevity. See Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, and the real Billie Burke all together in The Wizard of Oz (1939), and catch more of the delightful Fanny Brice in Be Yourself! (1930).

Classic Films in Focus: THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)

Certainly one of the top ten classic movies on almost any list, The Wizard of Oz (1939) has never ceased to attract new fans, and it remains the definitive adaptation of L. Frank Baum's classic novel, despite many contenders to that title both before and after. Its winning combination of story, spectacle, and sound draws viewers into its magical world, and, unlike Dorothy, they rarely yearn to go home. Directed by Victor Fleming (with help from George Cukor, Mervyn Le Roy, and King Vidor) and starring the divinely adorable Judy Garland, The Wizard of Oz may well be the perfect first film for the classic movie newcomer.

Garland stars as Dorothy Gale, a young Kansas girl who finds herself transported to the fabulous land of Oz after a cyclone carries her away from home. Unfortunately for Dorothy, her house crushes a wicked witch, which raises the ire of the witch's even more wicked sister (Margaret Hamilton). Dorothy sets off for the Emerald City in the hope that the powerful wizard there can return her to Kansas, and along the way she acquires three companions: a sympathetic Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), a sentimental Tin Man (Jack Haley), and a reluctant Lion (Bert Lahr). At the wizard's command, the friends attempt to earn their desired rewards by defeating the witch and her strange minions, but the seemingly Great and Terrible Oz turns out to be a rather different character from what they expected.

Beautifully nuanced performances from each and every actor make the characters live in our hearts. Garland is impossibly girlish and sweet, her big brown eyes round with a sense of wonder that we can't help but share. Bolger, Haley, and Lahr all endow their inhuman characters with tremendous humanity; they are funny because they are so likably real, and there's a sweetly platonic sense of romance in the Scarecrow's relationship with Dorothy. It's no wonder that she'll miss him "most of all." Margaret Hamilton sets the bar for wicked witches everywhere, and Frank Morgan pops up all over the place as an assortment of different characters, suggesting the dreamlike nature of Dorothy's adventure.

Even kids who have never known a world without 3D and CGI can appreciate the visual artistry of The Wizard of Oz. Its special effects have stood the test of time amazingly well, from the cyclone bearing down on Dorothy's farm to the army of winged monkeys filling the sky. The costumes and makeup still look fantastic, especially now that carefully restored versions of the film are available on DVD and Blu-ray. If anything, the effects and costumes might be too good for younger viewers; it's best to think about a child's tolerance for winged monkey attacks, scarecrow dismemberment, and witch melting before leaving your youngster to watch the picture alone. On the plus side, that first glimpse of Technicolor Oz is a moment of pure movie magic, an epiphany about film's unique ability to transport us to other worlds and change the way we see our own.

The Wizard of Oz earned six Oscar nominations; it won two, and Garland won a special Juvenile Award for her performance. It might have done better at the Academy Awards had it not come out in the single greatest year in Hollywood history, but that year would not have been as great without it. For more of Judy Garland and Ray Bolger, see The Harvey Girls (1946). The character actors who make up the cast of The Wizard of Oz turn up in hundreds of classic movies; they were some of Hollywood's hardest working performers, even though they never won or were even nominated for Academy Awards. Garland, of course, has become one of the most beloved stars of all time. See her in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Easter Parade (1948), and A Star is Born (1954) for more of her best performances.

This review was originally posted on Examiner.com. The author retains all rights to this content. 

For more about Judy Garland, read "10 classic movies starring Judy Garland" on Examiner.com.