Easter Parade

Seventeen musical numbers in 103 minutes. No one can unfairly claim that Easter Parade doesn’t offer a lot of bang for its buck, but that doesn’t mean it was necessarily money well spent. There’s no real story or concept here, just a loose connection of scenes that ostensibly tell a story but really function to get Fred Astaire and Judy Garland, in the only film they made together, from one song/dance to the next.

Easter Parade is a bit of a non-event considering it’s the meeting of Astaire and Garland, two of the movie musicals towering artistes. What Garland could do with phrasing, delivering, and vocal power, both its withholding and unleashing, Astaire could do with his elegant, languid bodily movements and control. They get plenty of chances to shine, but the surrounding film never adds up to much in the end. Astaire’s a vaudeville performer whose former partner goes solo (Ann Miller, largely wasted apart from her kinetic “Shakin’ the Blues Away”), so he finds Garland’s chorus girl and trains her to be his new partner. Naturally, they eventually fall in love, and Peter Lawford’s around the edges as a best friend and would-be suitor.

That’s not enough material to justify its running time, so Easter Parade functions like the Macy’s Day Parade – all artifice and happy to be seen with nothing much going on. Sequences that don’t involve singing, dancing, or Jules Munshin hamming it up in an extended bit about… tossing a salad (?!) are basically color commentary from toothy hosts before they cut back to something more visually interesting. It’s a soundtrack with some visuals to go along with it.