Login
It both seems entirely odd and somehow appropriate that Ernst Lubitsch’s yuletide romantic comedy, The Shop Around the Corner, would get the MGM musical makeover. While it is inferior to the original source material, In the Good Old Summertime is a solid, pleasing excursion through the story with Judy Garland and a few songs thrown in. Oh look, there’s an older Buster Keaton getting a chance to shine in a fun supporting part, too. With all of these ingredients, Summertime couldn’t help but be decent.
But it could have been so much more. Garland’s charismatic as ever, especially during “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland” where she merely sits still while plucking a harp and singing or during “I Don’t Care” where she combines physical comedy with a jubilant reading of the song. She also makes her slapstick bits work wonderfully, like a scene where her dress gets torn off by Van Johnson’s bicycle. She’s a dynamo tearing up the screen even when the material isn’t quite up to her considerable talents.
It’s in her screen partner that things get wobbly. Van Johnson was a pleasant enough leading man for, say, Esther Williams, but his limitations are evident against Garland. It’s hard to believe them as a credible romantic pairing as so much of the film is spent having them argue instead of finding common ground. His wholesome boy-next-door appeal works well against Garland, but he’s not quite the screen comic or dramatic actor she was. It leaves the film a bit lopsided at various points as Garland, Keaton, and S.Z. Sakall out pace him throughout.
It’s all very sweet and charming more than it is romantic, hilarious, or splashy as a musical. It’s Buster Keaton, originally hired as a gag writer, that makes the most of the limited screen time afforded him. He comes up with a meet cute for the central characters that goes awry, the destruction of a violin that happens so smoothly you barely register it as a choreographed gag, and nearly does a pratfall down some stairs. Summertime had ample room for more of his talents, either through setting up the gags or performing them on his own.
Hell, In the Good Old Summertime has ample room for more song and dance. There’s relatively little of that here until the final stretch involving a big party and a barbershop quartet. It’s here that Garland joins the quartet for a fun “Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey” that lets her cut loose and be the vaudevillian performer she was in her bones. It’s clearly borrowing the vibe and aesthetic of Meet Me in St. Louis, and it needed some of that film’s breakout musical numbers to liven things up.
In the Good Old Summertime is notable mainly for its historical placement. This was Garland’s penultimate film for MGM, and her next, Summer Stock, would prove the starting point of the long unwinding of her career as a movie star. There’d be highs (1954’s A Star Is Born, 1963’s I Could Go on Singing), but it was mostly a slow descent into addiction, self-destructive behavior, and her premature death at age 47. It’s hard to look at how lovely and dewy she is here and think that in twenty years it would all come to a crashing halt.
In a happier note, there’s the first screen appearance of Liza Minnelli. She appears at all of three-years-old as Garland and Johnson’s daughter in the final scene. If she looks confused by it all here, that feeling wouldn’t last very long. Minnelli would rapidly go on to her own pop culture dominance and eventual EGOT (yes, I consider the honorary awards as valid).
Still, this isn’t anywhere near the worst adaptation of this property. I’m looking at you, You’ve Got Mail. It’s safely middle-brow musical entertainment. Perfect for wasting away a lazy weekend afternoon.
