By Michael Koresky
Translator: Qin Tian
Proofreading: Easy two three
Source: Film Comment (September 25, 2019)
It's been 50 years since Judy Garland died, and she still deserves better treatment.
Judy Garland's singing voice sounds today with tears in her eyes. She, a quintessential figure in the film industry, is now once again being presented in newly produced biopics about her to satisfy our morbid enjoyment. Unsurprisingly, and sadly, Rupert Gould's Judy focused only on the end of the idol star's career, especially her disastrous performance in London's "Street Talk" nightclub in the late 1960s, when she left us a few months later at the age of 47.
Judy
The film's mistakes and pomp and circumstance have nothing to do with Renee Zellweger, on the contrary, it is her brilliant performance that transforms Renee Zellweger into Judy Garland. It's a traumatic, firm and voyeuristic focus on Judy, which is like an intermediary for the self. Even if there are only a few flashback passages in the film, the audience can see the moments of her youth, and it is these past moments that cause judy's heart to heal the pain. Although in the last paragraph of the movie, Judy re-sang the song "Above the Rainbow" with great enthusiasm, Judy in "Judy" has been hurt more than a little in the entertainment industry.
Judy Garland's long-standing appeal to the queer community has made her no longer appear to be a victim of the star system. More suspiciously, even if it wasn't offensive— she got caught up in the kind of melodrama she was reluctant to make.
Edis Piaf's biopic Life of the Rose — which earned Marion Cotillardy an Oscar — at least bravely turned the elegance of Piaf's past into something sincere. One of the real difficulties faced by the movie "Judy" is to show the heyday of Judy Garland's life, not the lowest point.
Life of the Rose
At the same time, the problem is that, in the adaptation, it tries to intertwine her dual identity as an actor with extraordinary talents and an ordinary person who shoulders many emotional burdens. In addition to finding a convincing actor who plays Judy Garland early in her career, the difficulty is also in imitating her without difficulty. This method of acting requires a special element that has never been seen before in adaptations of Judy's life experiences: her joy.
A joyful, emotional Judy Garland is enough to elicit the most perfect and compromised works she shot in the 1940s, which was also the most successful period of his adult career. This joy in Judy also made the intense insecurities and weaknesses of her timidity that had defined her before—in books and biopics—natural and normal.
Judy Garland's The Wizard of Oz
The habitual drug-addicted judy in the movie Judy takes me back to that time, so I can recall why she meant a lot to me, to gay culture, to music, to movies, and these are the ways she connects with things.
Without Judy from the MGM era, there would be no Judy Garland's tragic life as an antithesis of herself— the neat star image in respectable films. And in 1950, when Judy Garland was fired by MGM, she experienced a series of collapses (culminating in her replacement in The Flying Swallow Golden Gun), and audiences' perceptions of her may have changed forever.
"Flying Swallow Golden Gun"
Queer theorist Richard Dale believes that this is a radical break with Judy Garland with the perfect image he has forged in the past, and has led her to "a period of special relationship with pain, the ordinary, the normal, and Judy Garland's connection to these emotions also provides the possibility for the gay male community to interpret her." This reading ran almost throughout Judy Garland's "half" career, as well as several subsequent "comebacks", such as the films "A Star Is Born" (1954), "The Trial of Nuremberg" (1961), "I Can Still Sing" (1962), and her appearance on the stage of Carnegie Hall in London and New York, and then released her own album under Congressional Music Records, as well as her co-production with CBS television in the 1960s. Judy Garland Show".
The Birth of a Star (1954)
For Judy at this stage, the Judy Garland of the 40s faded into a point of reference, a past life, a trauma she had to overcome. However, she had to experience this trauma over and over again in her own songs after the cruel twist of fate. In a sense, her gay male fan base seems to have grown up from this state of dichotomy — a rewarding but difficult time when she could have been labeled a "survivor."
Often accused of being too emotionally revealing, Judy Garland, as a gay idol, has a hard time matching the Judy Garland we want to see. The carefree, young, charismatic, witty and humble Judy of the past brought many works to mgm' crystal cinema palace, such as "Only for You and Me" (1942), the untapped "Star Dream" (1943), and "Flowers and Butterflies" (1948).
Flowers And Butterflies (1948)
She also saved Vincent Minnelli's Pirates of the Wind (1948), who had previously filmed Fire Tree honeysuckle with Judy Garland (1944), a film that fully demonstrated Judy's natural, astonishingly calm performance. Based on what we know about Judy's later career, her private relationship with Vincent Minnelly has developed rapidly, and her American musicals, often highly recognizable among gay men, can be read from a queer perspective, especially The Pirates, which has been an exemplar of classical Hollywood queer theory.
I was impressed by another film produced by Arthur Fried, Harvey Girl (1946), a classic interpretation of Judy Garland's complex personality, but also a work that transcends the times, showing the lively side of Judy's stardom while also pointing to a darker path.
Harvey Girl (1946)
Judy Garland plays a girl named Susan Bradley, who is attracted by a newspaper advertisement for marriage and travels all the way from Ohio in the east to the west, she is strong but sensitive, natural but also a bit pretentious, lively but sometimes melancholy, wearing clothes that are not quite suitable for her, but her demeanor is good. At the beginning of the film, when she takes a locomotive to the small town of "Sandstone" in New Mexico, she seems to remind us that he came not just for love, but to see what the country looks like and pursue his own happiness.
As soon as she arrived, she quickly decided not to marry her fiancé, H.H. Hartsy: she looked skinny in front of him, and the role of H.H. Hartsy was played by Ziel Wells. With nowhere to go, she turned her wedding dress into an apron and worked as a waiter with the Harvey Girls, who then built the first restaurant in the town of "Sandstone": "Harvey's House", one of the many chains fred Harvey built around the Santa Fe railroad line in the late 19th century. These "charming waiters," as the subtitle card at the beginning of the film suggests, "conquered the West like David Croctor and Kit Carson, but not with gunpowder and rifles, but with steak and coffee."
Harvey Girl is an imaginative musical that takes on the history of the American West and is clearly a successful transformational work by Rogers and Hammerstein, the musical Oklahoma! The product of capitalization.
Oklahoma! After its premiere on Broadway in 1943, it is still a huge hit. The story about Harvey, which was acquired by MGM from the Harvey family in 1942, was originally a film for Lana Turner that was not a "star tool" created. Later, Roger Edens, the "all-round star" of music arrangers and composers at MGM Studios, became interested in it, and on this basis, Arthur Fred began to work as producer of the film.
Harvey Girl is Judy Garland's first color musical film after the success of Fire Tree Honeysuckle, and the entire film was based on her star influence. The first scene of the film clearly shows That Judy Garland is the protagonist of the entire film: she wears a powder-blue dress and a beige scarf, fashionably pulls up her hair, sits on the tail of the train, and sings the gentle lullaby "In the Valley Where the Evening Sun Goes Down"; the camera gently pushes in and out, sometimes hesitantly because of her singing, sometimes like a fire-fighting moth.
The song was followed by another striking, climactic song in the film, "On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe," which was arranged and written by Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer, and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song that year.
The song is reminiscent of the exciting and outstanding song "The Trolley Song" from "Fire Tree Honeysuckle", and Harry Warren's earlier "Chattanooga Choo Choo"—which appeared in the 1941 film Serenade of the Valley of the Sun, in which the melody, rhythm and lyrics of the wedding song are combined with the scene of the train moving in the film, which is clearly a form of musical film revolution in the United States.
Its beginning serves as an ensemble, and when the train comes in, the music gives the protagonist, the supporting characters the same weight as the accessories: the cattle rancher in a fruit-colored scarf, the blacksmith of the town, and the girls who came here from the Eastern United States and dreamed of becoming "charming waiters", two of whom sang to the camera: "We are the old-fashioned female teachers from Grand Rapids, Michigan, but we can read and write, and counting is not our dish!" The song is later pushed to a climax by Judy Garland – she comes to the center of the frame, the other actors surround her, and the camera's rocker shot eventually moves down to her side.
As Hollywood moved away from war and struggled to tap into postwar anxieties about masculinity, there were fewer and fewer stories of women at work. Harvey Girl can be seen as a masterpiece of Western music starring women before The Flying Swallow Golden Gun, Jayne the Wild Girl (1953) and Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964). All of this embodies the idea of female exceptionalism, and Harvey Girl focuses on women working together for a common goal—that is, providing customers with "sweet and sweet" service, which has a special pleasure.
Garland's Susan falls in love with Ned Trent (played by wide-toothed actor John Hodick, whose face always looks like a character on a "most wanted" poster), the owner of a local bar in the Alhambra, who at first dismisses his new rival, Harvey's Lunch house, calling it "a place to sell food and cat-faced girls.") In the Alhambra, however, the rivalry between Susan and Cabaret Girl-Een (played by the intelligent and young Angela Lansbury, who was only 20 at the time) is at the heart of the film, a tension between two professional women that is eventually revealed and ends in mutual respect.
The quarrel between Susan and Eun, played by Judy Garland, is a symbolic expression of the fiercely competitive relationship throughout the film: the opposition between the old and the new; the opposition between the unregulated West and the civilized and decent East; the confrontation between the overindulgent bar cabaret girl and the waitress at the family restaurant; and the contrast between musical styles, erotic and comical music and the restrained waltz (the swing your partner), which was later interrupted for its wonderful performance Round and Round], the shot of the song ends with a tilted and shaky shot).
Of course, family restaurants eventually triumphed, and the Alhambra's fame extended beyond the town, expecting the results of the homogenization of mass culture. Judy Garland in the film is a healthy figure — the joyous song hit the heart of America and matches his image during the MGM company. At the same time, Harvey Girl is also the iconic work of Judy Garland's film and television characters. When her status as heroine was fixed, the uneasiness in her was also revealed, and as I just mentioned, "a darker path" stretched out before her.
In harvey girl's strangest and most emotional scenes, Susan joins two other waitresses, played by Virginia O'Brien and young Cyde Charles, who played her first vocal role in the film, though her singing voice was matched.
At night, dressed in frilled nightgowns, they swirled on the porch of their boarding houses, quietly singing ballads about their fears and failures in life and love: "It's too cold, too cold, too cold, we're going to grow old soon, alas, it's a great big world." As the women climbed into their respective beds, the music faded away, and a shocking gunshot broke the lamp on the ceiling; the rupture marked the end of the scene and the end of the song, but we can now also see it as an expression of a potential shift at a more central point.
On set, Garland's capricious behavior escalated further; her daily tardiness, cancellations, illness, and lack of communication were heavily documented, suggesting that her relationship with the studio was increasingly strained. Garland herself later said that during filming, "she had a nervous breakdown and went to work every day with tears in her eyes." Work didn't give me pleasure. For me, the studio became a haunted house." There is no doubt that her performances show a serious intention, and even in the lightest roles she plays, Garland always shows a persistent calmness. Yet, as brave Susan Bradley, she maintains a bright-eyed optimism and a prescient confidence that cuts through melancholy.
In this article, I could have easily chosen one of Judy Garland's more overt, or at least academic gay films, such as The Wizard of Oz, The Pirates, or A Star Is Born. But for me, the homosexual implications of Harvey Girl are undeniable. As Richard Dell reminds us, Judy Garland's attraction to homosexuality has long relied on the coordination of opposing emotions, as she repeatedly and tearfully sang in "When You're Smiling" and "Get Happy." Harvey Girl's entertainment is often broad and pompous, but it embodies the essential difference in the character of Judy Garland.
One only needs to see the miracle of her appearance, not the sting of her tragic failure, and to fully understand why she can endure it.