George Sidney (1946)
In the early stages of The Harvey Girls it’s relieving and almost restful that the Judy Garland character’s situation isn’t critical. By the last half hour, Garland’s passionate, naked emotionality is badly needed – and supplied, so that it too comes as a relief. The eponymous heroines of the film are a group of waitresses who work at the Harvey House eateries. The entrepreneur Fred Harvey (1835-1901) is credited with creating the first American restaurant chain, as well as promoting tourism in the South West of the country. According to Wikipedia, Harvey and his employees ‘successfully brought new higher standards of both civility and dining to a region widely regarded in the era as “the Wild West”‘. According to the BFI programme note, posses of Harvey girls – ‘young women of good character, attractive and intelligent, aged 18 to 30’ – were brought to Southwestern communities to counteract the influence there of the showgirls-cum-prostitutes who worked in saloon bars and dance halls. The legends at the start of the film affectionately describe the Harvey girls as ‘conquering the West with a beef steak and a cup of coffee’ – emulating the men of an earlier generation who did it by building railroads. This sounds a great American subject and the opposition of the waitresses and the disreputable girls should be amusing but the film is a real disappointment.
When we first see her with the Harvey girls on the train heading for the town of Sandrock, Susan Bradley (Garland) isn’t one of them: she’s going there to marry a man she’s fallen for through the letters they’ve been exchanging since Susan answered a lonely hearts ad. Thanks to Garland’s powerful individuality, Susan never seems quite to fit with the other girls, who are dully homogenised (even though they include Cyd Charisse). The director George Sidney and a team of screenwriters too numerous to mention take the Harvey girls’ good character more or less seriously – they’re involved in humorous bits, of course, but it’s a humour tinged with the kind of processed wholesomeness that began to disfigure big Hollywood musicals as they came to represent a rearguard action of ‘family entertainment’ in the decades following World War II. The Harvey girls, with the sole exception of Garland, are such tiresome goody-goodies that you soon feel you’re bound to root for the ‘bad’ girls instead but it turns out they’re tedious too – with the sole exception of Angela Lansbury as their ringleader, Em. She holds a torch for Ned Trent, the owner of the local saloon, and Susan also falls in love with him once the letter-writer, H H Hartsey, is revealed to be a laughing stock, far from young and not remotely good looking. In fact Hartsey, as played by Chill Wills, is the second liveliest male in town, though that’s certainly damning with faint praise. The others – John Hodiak (Trent), Preston Foster (a shady judge) and Kenny Baker (a lovestruck musician) – are a dreary line-up even by the standards of the genre. It’s just as well Ray Bolger is on hand to do some wonderful comedy dancing but a shame that he ends up in a number with the Harvey girls’ house mother, emphatically played by Marjorie Main. I don’t remember having seen Main before but I found that a little of this famous performer went a very long way.
The film’s best-known number ‘On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe’ deservedly won an Oscar but otherwise the songs are pretty desperate, even if they are by Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer. They’re interesting chiefly as evidence that, in the Hollywood of the period, famous names like these were expected to write so much so often that it’s not surprising they hit some flat spots. The Harvey Girls, photographed by George J Folsey, is brightly coloured and energetic but the vividness and the high spirits seem forced. Judy Garland has a good bit with a gun which she uses to hold up the saloon (when the Harvey diner is out of provisions); she and Angela Lansbury, who’s pleasingly easy and polished, have a few good moments staring each other out. I didn’t get the subplot about the local church having closed down: was it really the case that tarts like Em and her colleagues were such a strongly baleful influence that everyone in Southwest communities stopped believing in God? George Sidney had a lengthy career in Hollywood but his staging is lame – the big fight between the good girls and the good time girls is particularly poorly done. The Harvey Girls is a salutary reminder that it doesn’t pay to get too nostalgic about old musicals.
8 November 2011
