The MGM Movies–Judy Garland’s Place
In the last post, we said that we were about to make a transition from Victor Baravalle and Robert Russell Bennett to Conrad Salinger. We are also about to step into the Arthur Freed unit at MGM, where all the great musicals were created. As you will shortly see, the great MGM singers and dancers also needed great tunes, great orchestrators, great choreographers, great directors, great film editors, etc. Salinger became part of this group of creative talent when he left RKO to work with Roger Edens and Lennie Hayton at MGM. Salinger orchestrated most of the musicals. We are going to take a look at those musicals, as we said in the previous post. However, we are also going to point out the origin of the music because most of it came from Broadway or Tin Pan Alley in New York.
We can make a strong case that between 1937 when The Broadway Melody of 1938 was released and 1950, when Judy was replaced in Annie Get Your Gun, the studio used and abused this great talent, grinding out everything from Andy Hardy movies to smash hit musicals. Judy was unique–never sure of herself despite her enormous talent, half child and half woman, fragile, vulnerable and courageous. Judy was signed at age 13 (in 1935) and was tossed out of MGM in 1950, 15 years later. Her big comeback in 1954 with the Warner Brothers production of A Star Is Born was a critical success and a box office failure, because Jack Warner hacked over 30 minutes from the film so that it would fit into a two hour slot at local theatre houses.
The Broadway Melody of 1938 was under the musical direction of George Stoll and was released in August 1937, just after Judy’s 15th birthday. According to Wikipedia, at a studio birthday party for Clark Gable, one of MGM’s biggest stars, young Judy sang a song to “The King” that came from the second edition of a Broadway revue called The Honeymoon Express (1913). The song was “You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It)” and was written by James V. Monaco (music) and Joseph McCarthy (lyrics). Judy’s rendition was so well received that the studio inserted it into the movie; it was Judy’s first appearance in a major motion picture.
According to Wikipedia, in September 1935, composer Burton Lane was asked by Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, to go to the Orpheum Theater in downtown LA to watch the vaudeville act of the Garland sisters. Out of the three sisters, Judy was asked to come to the studio for an audition, where she sang a new song, just published at the end of 1934. It was called, “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart.” It was written by James F. Hanley and introduced into the December 1934 Broadway revue, Thumbs Up! Of course, Judy was immediately put under contract. She had just turned 13. By 1938, MGM put the singer and the song into a movie, called Listen Darling; we see both a young Freddie Bartholomew (14 at the time but a veteran by that time, appearing in such films as David Copperfield in 1935, Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1936 and Captains Courageous in 1937) and a beautify Mary Astor in the audience.
It is important for us to emphasize that the first two important songs for Judy came from Broadway; nor is it a coincidence that the third major song was written by a Broadway composer. Harold Arlen had composed popular music for The Cotton Club in Harlem (“Get Happy” and “Stormy Weather” with Ted Koehler), and had composed music for 10 Broadway revues by December 1937 (including Life Begins at 8:40 in 1934 and Hooray For What! in 1937). He worked with E.Y.”Yip” Harburg in New York when they collaborated on Hooray for What! In 1938, they collaborated once again when MGM chose Arlen to write the music for the new production, The Wizard of Oz. The role of Dorothy was first offered to Shirley Temple and then Deanna Durbin. God was smiling on humanity because both turned it down, making way for Judy to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
In the next segment, we will take a look at Judy’s contributions to Strike Up the Band (1940) and Ziegfeld Girl (1941).