Small Town Girl

I think this musical is highly underrated. Yes the plot is not particularly original, but how many are original. The plot and acting are not a strong point, but it's a musical. To me this is better than half the Astaire Rogers musicals which I do love. The singing by Nat King Cole and Jane Powell are superb. Plus there are so many wonderful character actors in this like SZ Sakal, Billie Burke and Chill Wills. Their comedy is really great. The dances are by Busby Berkeley and music by Andre Previn. How can you ask for more? It should be remastered and get higher reviews by the critics. I was overwhelmed by the Take me to Broadway number by Bobby Van. This is the best Ann Miller I have seen. She did at least two fabulous tap dancing numbers including a splashy flamenco dance near the end.

SMALL TOWN GIRL was a 1953 musical from the MGM stable about a rich playboy (Farley Granger) who gets arrested for driving too fast through a small town and falls for the sheriff's pretty young daughter (Jane Powell). Nothing really special here, Granger and Powell are charming enough, but this film will always standout in my mind because of two musical numbers performed by supporting players Ann Miller and Bobby Van. Both of these numbers would later be featured in different installments of THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT. "You Gotta Hear that Beat" was a sizzling production number featuring Ann Miller dancing amongst a disembodied orchestra where you only see the arms/hands of the orchestra playing various instruments. The second number "Take Me To Broadway" featured Van as a human pogo stick, bouncing his way all over town, greeting people and interacting with people and places in town, but he never stops hopping. It's just an amazing number and because of these two musical highlights, SMALL TOWN GIRL is a film I will always remember.

Jane Powell gets to try a role first done by Janet Gaynor in a musical remake of Small Town Girl. Though she has top billing the best numbers in the film are given to Bobby Van and Ann Miller.

Playboy Farley Granger goes whizzing through Jane's small town and interrupts the church service. The cops clock Farley at 85 miles an hour and he's arrested and hauled before Judge Robert Keith. Farley's passenger is fiancé and musical comedy star Ann Miller. They're in a big rush to elope.

As it turns out the Judge is Jane's father and Farley's attitude earns him 30 days in the joint. Jane also has a boyfriend in Bobby Van, the son of the local department store owner, S.Z. Sakall. Of course she takes one look at handsome Farley and she shifts her romantic gears.

The big number that everyone remembers from Small Town Girl is Take Me to Broadway where Bobby Van acts like a human pogo going through the entire town or at least one very big MGM soundstage. The original film had James Stewart in Van's part and was considerably smaller.

Robert Taylor was in Farley Granger's part and wasn't quite as haughty or arrogant as Granger plays it here. Yet in both cases you can see why the small town girl thought Prince Charming arrived.

Small Town Girl is not the best MGM musical done, nor is it the best of Jane Powell's films for MGM. But it's entertaining enough.

The tagline I quote above was prominently featured on the posters outside the Bay Theater in Pacific Palisades, California, where I saw this film in mid-summer of the year of its release. I hadn't yet entered my teens and, up to that point, had only seen "Singin' in the Rain" from among the treasure trove of M-G-M's greatest musicals. So with my admittedly undeveloped critical tastes, this amiable pastiche seemed pretty good. And Busby Berkeley's showstopping inventions - Ann Miller's tap dance among all those disembodied instrumentalists and Bobby Van's seemingly endless pogo dance through the small town of M-G-M's backlot (One can only imagine Berkeley slave-driving Mr. Van to achieve that amazing feat of energy and agility!) - are still moments I can distinctly remember from that first viewing.

Even when M-G-M wasn't adding a Midas touch to one of their musicals, the studio assembled some talented professionals both before and behind the cameras, and this one has its share. And for fans of Nat King Cole, one of the all-time greats, there's even a brief song in a nightclub (the sort of thing that M-G-M could easily excise to spare the sensitivities of white Southerners, as they did with Lena Horne's solos in previous Technicolor memories, although by the mid-Fifties, Mr. Cole's appearance was probably not removed for bookings below the Mason-Dixon line.)

Small Town Girl is cute, fluffy and moderately entertaining. It tells the story of a handsome rich young man (Farley Granger) and the titular daughter of the small town judge who sentences him to 30 days in jail for speeding. Antics ensue.

There is much singing and dancing and Bobby Van has a long scene where he hops through town -- even with two or three cuts, it's still a whole lot of hopping!

What made me sit up and take notice, though, was Nat "King" Cole's number, set in a New York nightclub. It makes the film definitely worth watching, even worth buying.