Girl Crazy **** (1943, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Gil Stratton) – Classic Movie Review 3607

Mickey Rooney stars as a rich party boy called Danny Churchill Jr, who gets packed off by his dad (Henry O’Neill) to an all-male college way out West to stop him being girl crazy.

But, once there, he meets the Dean’s lovely granddaughter Ginger Gray, played by Judy Garland, along with a Specialty Singer (June Allyson), Polly Williams (Nancy Walker), Dean Phineas Armour (Guy Kibbee), Bud Livermore (Gil Stratton), Henry Lathrop (Robert E Strickland), Rags (Rags Ragland), Marjorie Tait (Frances Rafferty) and Tommy Dorsey’s Orchestra.

Despite all this top talent here, the delicious, it is the effervescent young star duo Rooney and Garland plus the classy George and Ira Gershwin songs (‘Embraceable You’, ‘I Got Rhythm’) who have director Norman Taurog’s exceedingly pleasant 1943 MGM musical all to themselves.

Though Taurog is the credited director, the movie’s choreographer Busby Berkeley filmed the climax. Girl Crazy is based on Guy Bolton and Jack McGowan’s Broadway stage musical, with the usual considerable cutting and tampering expected when Hollywood gets to work on a show.

The full original score has been re-recorded on CD in the Eighties with a cast including Garland’s daughter Lorna Luft. It is a remake of Girl Crazy (1932) and it was filmed again as When the Boys Meet the Girls (1965).

Mickey Rooney died on April 6 2014, aged 93.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3607
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