Back to Babes in Arms and Strike Up the Band

We are back in the land of something borrowed and something blue. In the case of the movie, Babes in Arms (1939), the movie was adapted from the stage musical, Babes in Arms (1937), by George Stoll and Roger Edens. For the movie, Strike Up the Band (1940), MGM licensed the name and the Gershwin tune, “Strike Up the Band,” from the 1927 Broadway show and rejected the rest of the Broadway plot and music. For both of these movie musicals, MGM used its famous formula for box office success–get some of the younger players on the lot together and cook up a scheme to sing and dance.  “Hey, kids; let’s put on a show” was the rallying cry.  At the beginning, the place was usually an unused barn near the high school. By the time we got to Babes in Arms (1939) and then Strike Up the Band (1940), the sets started to get more elegant and expensive; the high school motif had “gone uptown.” In 1941, Babes on Broadway was released and made no pretense of being a local high school show.

One of the standard ploys used in these movies, starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, was to have the older boy (Mickey) view the younger girl (Judy) as just another one of the kids at school. Judy was always more romantically interested in Mickey, and the audience spent the entire time in the movie theatre silently urging Mickey to wake up and notice this beautiful girl. In the movie version of Babes in Arms, Judy was going to teach Mickey a lesson, permitting her to sing “I Cried for You” to his framed photograph. The movie used only two of the original Rodgers and Hart songs, the title song and “Where or When.” Judy’s lament, “I Cried for You” was written by Gus Arnheim, Abe Lyman and Arthur Freed. She is so good in this song, it is hard to remember that she was only 17 years old.

In the movie Strike Up the Band, we can see Judy learning how to express her feelings in the course of the duet with Mickey. They are singing “Our Love Affair, ” written by Roger Edens and Arthur Freed.

One of the points that we should stress is that most Broadway scores before 1943 were simply a collection of songs; of course, the major exception to that observation was Show Boat (1927).  Even with the glorious Kern score, though, there was one interpolation—the use of “After the Ball,” written in 1891 by Charles Harris. Magnolia sings this in Chicago in Act Two to a rowdy New Year’s Eve crowd. Watch as her father tries to hush the crowd.

The Broadway show, Babes in Arms, contained a series of songs for different singers, all of whom were young and eager to create a good impression. For some, this was their first Broadway show. The plot of the show was somewhat convoluted, but it involved vaudevillians who have left their children alone on Long Island in order to tour on a vaudeville circuit. In addition, there are two brothers called the DeQuincy Brothers (in reality the Nicholas Brothers, who we saw in the Glenn Miller movies), and a former couple who have been trying to reconcile.

The play got into race relations, broken marriages, women’s independence and romantic love. Because there are so many good songs in the score, various people have tried to turn the book into a more integrated musical, but in essence, this is a musical about a bunch of kids trying not to be sent to a work farm.  Their answer is to put on a show, which sounds more like an MGM movie than a Broadway musical.

Billie’s car breaks down and Val, one of the kids, tries to help. They are immediately attracted to each other and sing about the feeling of seeming to know someone you have just met.  In the movie, the song is given to Douglas McPhail and Betty Jaynes. However, people who comment are more affected by Judy’s short rendition at the end of the first chorus.

Here is the recording by Greg Edelman and Judy Blazer of the same song in the restoration recording on New World Records (1989), with orchestrations by Hans Spialek intact. We take pride that the music editor on this recording was Larry Moore.

This post is getting a little long, and we have only covered about one half of the material. So, let’s take a break here and follow up in Part II on Monday.