Judy and I

There were some things that got in the way. When the ABC (I think) ran the Andy Hardy movies I was old enough to regard them, and the family gathering round to watch them, with disdain. Cheap sentimentality it seemed to me.

Then there was geography. Brunswick and Coburg had five cinemas along its Sydney  Road spine running from the Empire down near Dawson Street up to the Plaza in Coburg. But the Hoyts Padua, Melbourne's greatest art  deco palace atop the hill on Sydney Road, was the place to go for first release movies from the companies whom Hoyts dealt with - Fox, Warners and United Artists. MGM movies didn’t get into Brunswick until they were months old. Old. Old. The Alhambra was the last place movies played. Three programs a week including Wednesday ranch nights. But not MGM movies.

Brunswick was not a place for Judy Garland fans.

I wonder whether the first Judy Garland movie I saw was her last, Ronald Neame’s I Could 

Singing. Made in 1963 and reaching Melbourne at last when it was slipped into the underground Albany, a former newsreel theatre. I didn’t know, unless Colin Bennett in The Age made reference to it, that it was a bit of a take on Garland’s own life. Troubled star going to London to try and make  a comeback. Garland sang five songs in †he film. "I Am the Monarch of the Sea" (Judy Garland and Boys) from H.M.S. Pinafore by Gilbert and Sullivan, "Hello Bluebird", words and music by Cliff Friend"'It Never Was You", Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson, "By Myself", Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz and "I Could Go On Singing", Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg. 

At the screening I attended every song she song was met with a round of quite vigorous if a bit self-conscious applause by a small coterie of fans sitting otherwise quietly throughout. Garland was forty two when whe made the movie, close to a decade and a half since MGM had given her the flick after Summer Stock  in 1950.

So it took me quite long time over the years to see most of her films and certainly all of the great ones – The Wizard of Oz, Meet me in St Louis, The Pirate, The Clock and A Star is Born. Bill Collins and Foxtel made a huge contribution to the minutiae of her career. The task  still isn’t completed because I’ve never felt any great curiosity about going back to those apparently beloved Andy Hardy movies. I have however developed quite a soft spot for the Gershwin based Girl Crazy with Mickey Rooney.

Rooney is represented in Judy  in the flashbacks to Garland’s early days at MGM when that total arsehole Louis B Mayer manipulated Garland’s mind and her career, forced drugs upon her, exploited her naivety and no doubt felt no shame. These are brilliant moments in a movie which seeks to link those early days in the movie business with the alcohol and prescription drug-fuelled shambles that her life degenerated into. 

To compensate Garland hurled herself at shameless males. They might be called bludgers in Oz-speak and they let her down over and over again. 

Rupert Goold’s film and Renee Zellweger’s performance may fiddle with the facts as they are generally known. The last husband who seems to abandon her in the movie was apparently the person who found her overdosed body for starters. But it’s all quibble. It's quite a movie. Zellweger makes it of course, using her own voice which may well be in about the same shape that Garland’s was at the end, or maybe that's the point she's trying to make. Notwithstanding she sings half a dozen songs and every one of them set my heart throbbing.

...and as a reminder of just what Garland could do, here she is singing the greatest Broadway song ever written.Just click here for the Youtube version