"In The Good Old Summertime"

I'm back. Sorry I missed you last night, but it was one of those nights where I hadn't watched a movie and was drawing a blank on what I could write about. It was Sunday, and you already could've guessed about "good singin' in church" and the supertired factor, and nowdays, because I am at Pearl's for approximately 17 out of every 24 hours, there ain't much new stuff that I can tell ya. Hence the movie reviews and the stream-of-consciousness jabbering that sometimes springs forth as I write them. A good night is a jabbering night, but last night was unfortunately not one of them.

If you - including the General You as well as the Individual You - were here in person, then the jabbering would probably run nonstop and perhaps even out of control, because I love to talk about stuff, even when I am tired. But because General & Individual You are not here, typing must suffice, and typing - no matter how skilled the typist - can no more compete with the speech process than can a computer compete with human thought. Most nights, typing works and I think of things to say, but once in a while I miss a night.

Man, I wish I had somebody to talk to in real life. I don't mean "The Boys" because as you know I do not want to be One Of The Boys at this stage of my life. Ergo, by the process of elimination we can determine that I wish I had someone to talk to who is not a man, and who is someone who "gets it". 

You know what I mean. Someone who instinctively understands the gargantuan magic and mystery of life and who can share that knowledge without a word being said.......but who also likes to jabber incessantly on occasion about any topic at all.  :)

Well anyway, I did watch a movie tonight : "In The Good Old Summertime" (1949) starring Judy
Garland and Van Johnson. I was hoping to continue the theme of Summer and Judy that I inadvertently started by watching the musical "Summer Stock" a couple of weeks ago. That was a Judy Garland movie I'd never seen and I was pleasantly surprised by it; it was really good, and moreover it was set on a farm, in the Summer as promised by it's title.

"Good Old Summertime", on the other hand, is Summer in name only. In fact, I can think of no other movie with such an incongruous title, because almost the entire story is set in Winter, at Christmastime.

What it is, is a remake of the very famous Jimmy Stewart (whose name must be pronounced as he himself would say it, ala "Jimmae Schtoo-art") classic "The Shop Around The Corner", which was remade yet again in the early 90s at the start of the Internet Age as "You've Got Mail".

"The Shop Around The Corner" is a more developed story than "Summertime", and focuses more on Jimmy Stewart's tenuous relationship with his boss at the music shop where he and his secret pen pal both work. They write long, philosophical letters to each other that slowly turn into love letters, and they have no idea that they work in the same shop. Yeah sure, you say......but that's how you get to be a great screenwriter, by making such a setup work.

It works great in both movies, in nearly identical fashion as far as the romantic angle is concerned (and I haven't seen "You've Got Mail", the Hanks/Ryan remake, but there is no way it could compare, trust me).

Anyhow, the main difference is that the original "Shop Around The Corner" plays up Jimmy Stewart's role and "Summertime" focuses on Judy Garland as the star, doing her thing as she does best, which was the selling point of the movie, meaning that she is gonna get to perform some Set Piece musical numbers of the type that made her a Hollywood legend. With a Star as big as Judy, she is going to be photographed a certain way, lit a certain way, and she is going to be guaranteed to have her star charisma - i.e. what she does on a movie screen - be the centerpiece of the movie. This doesn't mean that the whole film is about her character, because Van Johnson gets as much screen time. But this is clearly a Judy Garland formula picture, even though it is almost note for note the same story as "The Shop Around The Corner".

If you were to take that movie away, and say that it didn't exist, you would very likely consider "In The Good Old Summertime" a near classic, just because of the slowly building romance between Johnson and Garland, which is mostly successful on an emotional level because of her portrayal. What is a love story without emotion, right? And at the end, they nail it and you really feel it.

If it was the only version of the story it would be a 7.5 out of 10 Judy Garland Classic, because that's how great she was. But because it cannot help but be compared with the original "Shop Around The Corner", in which the Judy role was played to great effect by the tragic Margaret Sullavan, I will have to dock it a half point and call it a 7/10 (whereas "Summer Stock" would be an 8/10).

Still, even though it has nothing to do with Summer, "In The Good Old Summertime" gets Two Big Thumbs Up from me, because the cast is solid, the Technicolor is glorious, and Judy is Judy. She was one of the handful of greatest Movie Stars who ever lived.

See you in the morning.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)