A DATE WITH JUDY (MGM, 1948) Warner Home Video

One of MGM’s most perennially effervescent minor musicals, Richard Thorpe’s A Date with Judy (1948) is a tune-filled winner, starring MGM’s resident teenage chanteuse, Jane Powell as a precocious young girl in love. After misappropriating Deanne Durbin’s contract to Universal in 1933, MGM began its own aggressive star search for another winsome soprano to add to their ever-expanding roster of talent. They might have left well-enough alone, except that Durbin – judged as unsuitable and let go after a series of shorts, made a smashing success of her musical career over at Universal. So, naturally, MGM could not be outdone. And MGM, at least in its heyday, was home to more musical acts than most every other studio in competition for that box office gold. And musicals, from the mid-1930’s to the late 1950’s were very big box office indeed. While other studios tried to bottle the magic of the genre, only MGM succeeded in making these kinds of empty-headed but very big-hearted, frothy and delightful confections.  If the studio could have, they would have starred Judy Garland in every musical they made. Keeping Garland working at a breakneck pace proved exhaustive and debilitating to the star in the long run. And in her wake, MGM discovered they had other talents on tap who could be called upon to do their musicals proud. Jane Powell certainly fit that bill; a pert and plucky, bright-eyed child, whose vocal abilities easily outshone her years, Powell made her debut on film in 1944’s Song on the Open Road – and independently produced ditty, released through United Artists. This brought Powell to the attention of Metro’s talent scouts. Before that, she had been a reoccurring featured performer on several popularized radio programs, as well as ‘the Victory girl’ – peddling war bonds and warbling rousingly patriotic songs to the fighting men overseas. But at war’s end, Powell’s career hit the stratosphere when MGM starred her in the opulent and escapist musical fantasy, Holiday in Mexico (1946). Pulling out all the stops, with a cast to include Walter Pigeon, Iona Massey and Roddy McDowell, the picture’s staggering success at the box office was proof positive MGM was off and running with a ‘brand new’ musical star.

And thus, it was inevitable Powell would follow up her meteoric studio debut with another musical offering. Comparatively speaking, A Date with Judy is remarkably subdued; the concentration here, more streamlined, with Powell cast opposite another of the studio’s one-time titans, Wallace Beery as her dear ole dad, Melvin; also, Elizabeth Taylor, effectively having entered her teenage years as Carol Pringle, the affluent and violet-eyed sexpot, looking positively ravishing in Technicolor. For contrast, Powell’s lead, Judy Foster, is the congenial, if only slightly mousy ‘girl next door’, desperately in love with the more mature, Stephen I. Andrews (Robert Stack), who favors Carol but has not the heart to break Judy’s, much to the chagrin of Carol’s brother, Ogden 'Oogie' Pringle (Scotty Beckett). For good measure, the cast is rounded out by orchestra leader, Xavier Cugat – playing himself, Selena Royale – as Judy’s mum, Dora, and, the vivacious Carmen Miranda as Rosita Conchellas; secretly hired by Melvin to teach him the rumba as a surprise for his wife’s wedding anniversary. Miranda was, by 1948, entering the emeritus years of her Hollywood career. The Portuguese-born ‘Brazilian bombshell’ who had set the world afire with her stunning cameo in Broadway’s Streets of Paris, almost immediately to lead to a lucrative contract at 2oth Century-Fox, where she appeared usually as exuberant and flashy support to that studio’s stable of stars, but with several garishly fun production numbers to recommend her, Miranda’s tenure at Fox ended with two leaden misfires that effectively caused Zanuck to lose interest in developing her act any further.

Miranda’s move to MGM ought to have resurrected her picture-making prospects, especially since she acquits herself rather effectively of two standouts in A Date with Judy: the rehearsal ditty, ‘Cookin’ With Gas’, for which Miranda’s charming fracture of the English language is on full display, and, Cuanto Le Gusta – appearing in copper spangles and shimmering satin with a modest drape of sequins braided into her hair. And, for a brief wrinkle, Miranda appeared to have moved on, almost immediately cast in another Jane Powell programmer, Nancy Goes to Rio (1950) where she sported her favorite outfit, a turban embroidered in multi-colored umbrellas as a performer in the Carnival del Rio. Sadly, this was to be the end of the rainbow for Miranda on film. Moving into nightclub work and the occasional appearance on television, on August 4, 1955, Carmen Miranda suffered a heart attack while appearing on The Jimmy Durante Show (1954). The effects were so mild, she continued with the act and even attended a party later that same evening. The next morning, she was discovered dead, felled by a second, and obviously lethal cardiac arrest. She was only 46-years-old; her body flown to Brazil, where her passing was declared with a national day of mourning.

Viewed today, virtually all of Jane Powell’s movie musicals are suspiciously similar. Following the passing of the studio’s wunderkind, Irving G. Thalberg in 1936, MGM’s raja, L.B. Mayer sought to both homogenize and streamline the studio’s ‘in-house’ style; arguably, if only eventually, to its own detriment. Mayer’s preference for immaculately tailored and glamorous storytelling, in which all men appeared handsome and all women - beautiful, was an edict that, at least during the war, passed the mustard as ‘must see’ escapist entertainment for the masses. Mayer would have preferred this era to go on indefinitely. But at war’s end, the returning G.I.’s made it known with a show of their dollars that ‘realism’ was increasingly sought after from their post-war entertainments. As, at least for a time, Mayer absolutely refused to entertain such a notion, MGM’s inimitable gloss continued to buck the trend and defy these changing times. So, there is nothing of reality in A Date with Judy; about as homespun as the average Andy Hardy movie – and actually, shot on the same back lot streets and cobblestoned byways as that lucrative Metro franchise, to effectively have run its cycle by 1946 (though MGM would make one last stab at resurrecting the intimate comedy/drama with 1958’s brutally out-of-touch, Andy Hardy Comes Home). In the wake of the Hardy series, Mayer believed he could tell other home-spun tales of small town kids and otherwise upstanding ‘normal’ folk – other slices of that all-pervasive Americana is so much adored, more the myth than the norm, nevertheless, influencing an entire generation of moviegoers, who sincerely hoped places like the fictional Carver existed in real life.

A Date with Judy emerges with that same antiseptic mantra for ‘family films’, if tune-filled and engaging as musical froth – all fizz, with no substance. The delights to be had here are mostly in Miranda’s novelty numbers; also, Powell trilling the Oscar-winning, ‘It’s a Most Unusual Day’ – not once, but twice; first, as a rehearsal number in her high school’s gymnasium as Oogie and the members of his teenage band play on, and then, to close out the show, accompanied by Cugat and his orchestra as part of the anniversary celebration for her parents. In between these book-ended pleasures came the comedic situations of pure misdirection, delightfully fulfilled by screenwriters, two Dorothy’s - Kingsley and Cooper - and Aleen Leslie, who developed the characters. Apart from Judy’s misguided romantic pursuit of the much older, Stephen Andrews, she also becomes embroiled in a subplot, suspecting her father of having an affair with Rosita, ultimately to briefly alienate Cugat from his singer. As background, the script included a minor reflection on the disparities between a ‘two’ and single-parent homelife; Judy, doted on by her loving father and mother, while Carol and Ogden are all but overlooked by their patriarch, Lucien (Leon Ames) – more invested in his business practices than his children; that is, until he suspects that his years of mangled affluence as the head of the family are fast approaching an end. A Date with Judy is effervescent entertainment, concocted with such lithe professionalism, one cannot help but admire the awe-inspiring efficiency of the studio system, all of its pistols firing in unison. There is, to be sure, a machinery at work here; Mayer’s dream factory, still capable of turning out the magic, seemingly without any effort at all. It is important to remember, it only ‘seems’ that way. What is here is actually crisply orchestrated for maximum effect, and, more often than not, it hits the bull’s eye with absolute perfection.  

The assembly line nature of this bread and butter is not, as yet apparent, as it would increasingly become throughout the mid-1950’s. And certainly, no one can deny, when it came to putting together a song and dance show, no studio on earth was as adept to make its mark quite so regularly – or with as much spellbinding, hand-crafted excellence on display – as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; the studio with enough braggadocio to advertise itself as possessing “more stars than there are in heaven,” – forgivable hyperbole.  A Date with Judy's screen scenario is light on plausibility, but not too heavy on the schmaltz – always a recipe for success, especially with Hungarian-born producer extraordinaire, Joe Pasternak in the driver’s seat. So, on this occasion, we find our Judy Foster, a winsome teenager whose world is turned upside down with the arrival of handsome, college-bound stud, Stephen Andrews – temporarily installed at Pop Scully’s (Lloyd Carrigan) Drug Store for the summer. Pop’s is a popular haunt with these small-town teens. After a misunderstanding between Judy and her high school beau, Ogden ‘Oogie’ Pringle, Judy elects to have Stephen take her to the local school dance in his stead; an invitation Stephen begrudgingly obliges as a favor to Pop. Alas, Judy on Stephen’s arm creates a bit of homespun jealousy. The lure, however, backfires when Stephen takes a very active interest in Judy’s close friend, Ogden’s sister, and high school senior, Carol (Elizabeth Taylor at her most smoldering).

Carol and Ogden come from an affluent background. Unfortunately, their widowed father, Lucien is so engrossed in establishing a family fortune to leave his heirs, he has quite forgotten how to be an invested parent in the present. Meanwhile, at the Foster home, Judy’s dad, Melvin has decided to take private rumba lessons to surprise his wife for their pending 20th wedding anniversary. With only two left feet as his guide, Melvin employs South American singer, Rosita Cochellas to ease him into the celebrated Latin rhythms. A wrinkle in the plot arises when Carol – discontented with Stephen’s mis-perceived lack of interest in her – tells Judy all men suffer from mid-life crises that can lead to discourse and even infidelity in what was once a solid relationship. Shortly thereafter, Judy accidentally walks in on her father with Rosita hiding in the closet and jumps to the worst of all possible conclusions. Her father is having an affair! This disillusionment is further stirred as Stephen finally takes an interest in Carol; the coupled having shared reservations about letting Judy down. Mercifully, Judy’s affections for Stephen were just an acute attack of puppy love. She really loves Ogden after all. At the penultimate anniversary party, Judy informs Cugat of what she suspects and Cugat and Rosita exchange some passionate words in Spanish before all is resolved accordingly. Her faith in men restored, Judy accepts Ogden’s class ring and performs a solo for her parent’s anniversary.

Given the lavish appointments of Jane Powell’s introductory picture for MGM, A Date With Judy plays it remarkably safe and low-key; relying on standards, ‘Love Is Where You Find It’ and ‘Through the Years’, repurposing Miranda’s Cuanto Le Gusta for the showstopper finale and marking the occasion with only a trio of new songs authored by Harold Adamson and Jimmy McHugh, to include the Oscar-winning, ‘It’s a Most Unusual Day.’ Relying on already pre-existing, free-standing back lots and interior sets, marginally redressed for this show, A Date with Judy feels very much like a stock company programmer of the ‘little gem’ class it so often revisited during these years, and, mostly, to good effect.  The cast is charming. The situations, if fanciful, are nevertheless, played with great finesse and heart, and the musical program – if hardly original – is also quite serviceable. On the surface, it has always been something of an enigma to try and deconstruct the ever-lasting appeal of MGM’s musical product from this particular vintage. Unoriginal, if hardly uninspired, the films that came from this spate of activity are textbook examples of home-grown Hollywood-based movie-making at its zenith. As another of the Metro’s alumni, Frank Sinatra once mused, “You can wait around and hope. But I tell you, you’ll never see the likes of this again!”

There are musicals and then there are MGM musicals. Only MGM could offer us such a delightful melding of talents into one utterly cozy classic such as this. A Date with Judy may not be mind-blowing in either its conception or execution, but it does hit all the high notes where so few movie musicals do – in our hearts. Warner Home Video’s DVD is just a tad above average. The Technicolor image is remarkably resilient in spots – with vibrant colors, warm flesh tones and a crisp solid appeal. However, there are whole portions where the color falters, or is weaker than expected. Mercifully, there are no egregious instances of Technicolor mis-registration. Age-related artifacts are kept to a bare minimum. Contrast is excellent. And there is a light smattering of film grain looking indigenous to its source. Remember, vintage 3-strip Technicolor was a grain-concealing process. This looks fairly film-like, and I have no doubt, could look 10X better in hi-def, if WAC ever gets around to offering us a Blu-ray release. A little bit of cost-effective color correction ought to have been applied as flesh tones infrequently reveal a margin of fading, and a slight lean towards an anemic pink caste. The audio is mono as originally recorded, presented in Dolby Digital 1.0 at an adequate listening level. Extras are limited to two short subjects and a theatrical trailer. Recommended…for now. Now, how about a Blu-ray?

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

4

VIDEO/AUDIO

3

EXTRAS

1