Steinesongo Too many fans seem to be blown away

ReaderKenka Let's be realistic.

Inadvands Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

filippaberry84 I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

HotToastyRag Unless you absolutely love Judy Garland, you can save yourself 100 minutes and just watch the famous song "On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe" from The Harvey Girls. I like her, but I'm not in love with her; I haven't watched every one of her films I can get my hands on.If you do love her and decide to watch the full movie, you'll see lots of beautiful costumes by Irene and Helen Rose Valles as Judy travels by train to the Wild West to become a mail order bride. The female travelers on the train have a different goal once they arrive: they want to open a restaurant and boarding house for respectable girls. And by that, I mean they want to have lots of chorus numbers. Ray Bolger, Judy's gangly pal from The Wizard of Oz joins the cast, as does the pouting Angela Lansbury, crotchety Marjorie Main, and willowy Cyd Charisse. It's up to you if you want to sit through this mediocre musical, or if you want to get the gist by watching the three-minute song.

gkeith_1 Excellent movie. Lots of singing and dancing. Bolger superb in his leaping, traveling tap dance. Main always good. Loved her purple dance outfit. Judy the best. Led the whole group in the train song. Very energetic and nicely choreographed. I marveled at how Judy weaved/wove in and out of the other players during the train song, at close range. This looked quite tricky. Many large group dance numbers have members way further apart. Lots of dance scenes have the dancers in huge, long rows, but this group in Harvey Girls has all mingled together. Wills, Main and Judy were in Meet Me in Saint Louis. Judy and Bolger were in Wizard of Oz.Hodiak cute and sweet; Preston a perfect bad guy. Lansbury can play a vicious bad lady; rather soft hearted at the end. Lansbury I also saw in a musical show in the movie Till the Clouds Roll By (I think that's the one; she is on a swing on stage -- also mid nineteen forties).Charisse excellent. O'Brien her usual deadpan excellence. The singing piano player sweet on Charisse was very charming.Judy's wedding gown wonderful. Reminded me of her wedding gown in the later forties movie The Pirate. Was this the same costume? The Pirate was 1948/1949, only two to three years later.Another major star in this movie was the train, lol.One problem, however, but it is of the times. Girls was the word. Judy was a girl getting married to a man out west. She never thought of herself as a woman. As far as the girls of the restaurant, maybe they were never thought of as adult women, either.Women's biggest aspirations were to get married. Waitresses is another politically incorrect word today. Waitressing was a planned career in those days? A way to get off the farm? Two schoolteachers ditched the life for slugging steaks to the cowhands. What the???? How ridiculous.This was a post World War II confection. It was mostly happy and carefree. How many of the cowhand actors had fought in World War II? How many of the actresses had been Rosie the Riveter on their way up to movie life?Still, IMO this movie is still way better than the typical shoot-down-plane bang bang war movies of that time period. Enough of the fighting and killing. Hurray for this type of singing and dancing confection, and kudos to Judy for heading this stellar ensemble cast.10/10

zetes Okay, if unmemorable, Western-based musical starring Judy Garland. The main reasons to watch it are for her and the Oscar-winning song, "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe", which, even if the name doesn't ring a bell, if you heard the tune, you'd recognize it. Ray Bolger reunites with Garland as the town's new blacksmith. He has some amusing dance numbers. Also, a very young Angela Lansbury. There's nothing much else to the film. The other songs are forgettable. They must have known this, since the Oscar winner keeps reappearing in the underscore throughout the picture. John Hodiak is a terrible choice for Garland's enemy-but-soon-to-be-beloved. I could never get past that shark grin. Marjorie Main annoys with her scratchy voice. For some reason, the filmmakers think it's hilarious to have her contribute to several of the musical numbers. It sounds like she underwent torture. All in all, it's amiable, but not really worth the time.

bkoganbing The Harvey Girls, a film to celebrate the first of the fast food chains which quite frankly would be what the Harvey Restaurant chain was back in the modernizing west. There are folks in the town who don't want to see the Harvey Restaurant established and thereby hangs the tale of this film.Preston Foster is the town boss and John Hodiak runs the saloon. These guys thrive on the town being in the Wild West accent on the wild. Foster's a rather shrewd villain, he realizes that the clean cut virginal Harvey girls who are servers might make the men forget the loose women of the saloon and that if they court and marry them and start raising families, they might demand a little law and order. That would be a disaster for Foster. Better to cut the problem off at the root.Hodiak however is a jaded sort and bored with the loose women of his establishment. In a cinema not under the Code influence, Angela Lansbury and her crew would be prostitutes. He kind of likes the idea of the Harvey Restaurant coming to town and likes it better when Judy Garland comes to town.Judy's come to town as a mail order bride, but when she sees Chill Wills is the prospective groom, both of them decide they're not suited for each other. Hodiak has been writing Wills's letters, a plot device that was used in the Joseph Cotten-Jennifer Jones film Love Letters. If you know about that film, you know how The Harvey Girls turns out.The Harvey Girls has come down in cinema history because of the famous On The Atchison, Topeka, And The Santa Fe number. The song itself won an Academy Award in 1946 for best original song and the number as staged by MGM is one of the longest and most complex in the annals of film. It runs about 20 minutes and just about every member of the cast except Hodiak and Foster get a line or two in the song. Of course it ends with Judy as well it should have.One thing I don't understand though is the under use of both Ray Bolger and Kenny Baker. Bolger of course had co-starred with Judy in The Wizard Of Oz, but he was far more known for being a Broadway star than a film player. He had just come off a big run in the last Rodgers&Hart musical By Jupiter. Kenny Baker was a famous radio singer who also had starred on Broadway in Kurt Weill's One Touch Of Venus with Mary Martin. Why these guys got the supporting roles they did is a mystery to me. I suspect both of them had a lot of their parts end up on the cutting room floor.MGM editing mastery was at its best in The Harvey Girls. The film was partially done on location and partially done at Culver City. The editing is so smooth you really can't tell.Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer wrote the score for The Harvey Girls and while the Atchison number dwarfs the rest, there's a song called It's A Great Big World that gets sadly neglected. It was sung by Judy Garland, Virginia O'Brien, and someone dubbing Cyd Charisse who first got noticed in this film for her dancing.As I said before if done today if some gazillionaire would finance a remake, Angela and her saloon girls would be portrayed more frankly as working girls. But that would also cause the film to lose some of its naive charm. And this film holds up quite well for 63 years and counting.