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I Could Go on Singing

  • 1963
  • Approved
  • 1h 40m
IMDb RATING
6.9/10
1.8K
YOUR RATING
Judy Garland and Dirk Bogarde in I Could Go on Singing (1963)
Jenny Bowman is a successful singer who visits David Donne to see her son Matt again, spending a few glorious days with him while his father is away in Rome in an attempt to attain the family that she never had.
Play trailer3:47
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26 Photos
DramaMusic

Jenny Bowman is a successful singer who visits David Donne to see her son Matt again, spending a few glorious days with him while his father is away in Rome in an attempt to attain the famil... Read allJenny Bowman is a successful singer who visits David Donne to see her son Matt again, spending a few glorious days with him while his father is away in Rome in an attempt to attain the family that she never had.Jenny Bowman is a successful singer who visits David Donne to see her son Matt again, spending a few glorious days with him while his father is away in Rome in an attempt to attain the family that she never had.

  • Director
    • Ronald Neame
  • Writers
    • Robert Dozier
    • Mayo Simon
    • Dirk Bogarde
  • Stars
    • Judy Garland
    • Dirk Bogarde
    • Jack Klugman
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    6.9/10
    1.8K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Ronald Neame
    • Writers
      • Robert Dozier
      • Mayo Simon
      • Dirk Bogarde
    • Stars
      • Judy Garland
      • Dirk Bogarde
      • Jack Klugman
    • 53User reviews
    • 15Critic reviews
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • Videos1

    Trailer
    Trailer 3:47
    Trailer

    Photos26

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    Top cast68

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    Judy Garland
    Judy Garland
    • Jenny Bowman
    Dirk Bogarde
    Dirk Bogarde
    • David Donne
    Jack Klugman
    Jack Klugman
    • George
    Aline MacMahon
    Aline MacMahon
    • Ida
    Gregory Phillips
    • Matt
    Russell Waters
    • Reynolds
    Pauline Jameson
    Pauline Jameson
    • Miss Plimpton
    Jeremy Burnham
    Jeremy Burnham
    • Young Hospital Doctor
    Eric Woodburn
    • Verger
    Robert Rietty
    Robert Rietty
    • Palladium Stage Manager
    Gerald Sim
    Gerald Sim
    • Joe - Assistant Mgr. at the Palladium
    David Lee
    • Pianist
    Leon Cortez
    • The Busker
    Al Paul
    • Al Paul - Jenny's Makeup Artist
    Frazer Hines
    Frazer Hines
    • Schoolboy
    Jack Arrow
    • Backstage Parent
    • (uncredited)
    • …
    Sheila Aza
    • HMS Pinafore Audience
    • (uncredited)
    • …
    Hyma Beckley
    • Theatre Audience
    • (uncredited)
    • Director
      • Ronald Neame
    • Writers
      • Robert Dozier
      • Mayo Simon
      • Dirk Bogarde
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews53

    6.91.8K
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    Featured reviews

    7bkoganbing

    A Closing Symmetry

    Though she didn't and couldn't have known it, I Could Go On Singing became Judy Garland's farewell to the big screen. In this role she's perfectly cast in a role that bears a lot of resemblance to the real Judy Garland, a famous singer with problems of custody who wants the son she gave up for adoption years ago.

    Some twenty years before young medical student Dirk Bogarde, studying in America fell in love with singer Judy Garland just starting her career. That career is something she wanted more than him. But one thing couldn't be changed and that was the boy child Bogarde left with her.

    Bogarde marries a girl from Great Britain and later on Judy who can't manage a baby and a career gives him up to Bogarde who adopts his own son with his wife and raises him. Now his wife is dead and Judy's back to lay a claim on her son played by Gregory Phillips.

    Of course Bogarde has never told his son about his origin and therein lies the story. It's the kind of tale we've seen in hundreds of films and radio and television soap operas.

    But of course what makes I Could Go On Singing special is the singing of Judy Garland. Giving this film which title could serve as her epitaph is Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg who wrote the title song and who wrote her famous Over The Rainbow.

    Judy also sings By Myself which was sung and danced to by Fred Astaire in The Bandwagon. But a song I'm really glad she did was the Kurt Weill-Maxwell Anderson song It Never Was You. That song comes from the score of Knickerbocker Holiday and it didn't make the screen version. I'm glad that Judy Garland used it in this film, giving it the classiest interpretation possible.

    A passable enough drama, but great singing and the best epitaph possible for a career which was one of the brightest.
    7blanche-2

    Sadly, Judy's last film

    1963's "I Could Go On Singing" would prove to be Judy Garland's final film, and what a shame.

    Here, Garland plays Jenny Bowman, a famous performer who comes to London with a manager (Jack Klugman) and an assistant (Aline McMahon) to do concerts and goes to see an ex-beau, Dr. David Donne (Dirk Bogarde) with a faux medical problem. He knows she has an ulterior motive.

    The two of them had broken up, but later, Jenny gave birth to their son. The newlywed David and his wife adopted the child because Jenny couldn't really handle carrying for a new baby and having a career. Matt never knew and believed that both David and his wife were his adopted parents.

    Jenny claims that now that David's wife is dead, she just wants to see her son (Gregory Phillips). Once she sees him, she wants to spend time with him - it spirals out of control.

    Despite its soapy plot, "I Could Go on Singing" manages to be very effective for two reasons: Judy Garland and Dirk Bogarde, both of whom lift this film up from the maudlin.

    Bogarde is an uncredited writer on this film, contributing a lot of Garland's dialogue, as the script needed work before she could take the role; he often participated in screen writing on his films.

    Garland plays her role as a brilliant talent who is a needy woman, but one who also is used to getting her way and knows what she wants. Despite an outer fragility, she knows how to stand up for herself.

    As an entertainer, she is second to none - magical, warm, exciting, passionate, and fun. Garland sings the title song plus "By Myself," "It Never Was You", and "Hello, Blue Bird," all beautifully performed. Garland looks petite and wonderful as well.

    During the scene in the hospital, in which David comes to see Jenny after she sprains her actor, the director, Ronald Neame, realized as the camera was rolling that the scene had passed out of the movie and into real life. Garland was no longer Jenny but Garland.

    There was an incredibly intense atmosphere in the room, so instead of yelling cut, doing another take, and repositioning the camera, he let the scene go on. Normally a scene like that would take all day to film.

    Bogarde realized that Neame wasn't going to stop and even altered his dialogue to respond to her. The result is an incredibly moving, very personal scene.

    Bogarde gives a low-key performance and is perfect opposite Garland, very British, attempting to keep his emotions even -- a very generous actor who was also helpful to Neame in keeping Garland going.

    There were a great many difficulties on the set, including an incident where a plate of food went flying through the air as Judy yelled at director Henry Hathaway. In the end, they all made it through, and the result is successful.

    We have lots of examples on the screen and in recording of Judy Garland's tremendous talent and brilliance. "I Could Go On Singing" is a look at a character very close to Garland and gives a good sense of the real woman. Art imitates life, or did life imitate art - with Garland, one never knows.
    Oct

    Judy's satisfying swansong

    This film, Judy Garland's last, was panned at its premiere for being old-hat melodrama. The theme of secret mother love recalls "Madame X", with Garland as a Gladys George or Ruth Chatterton. Her big scene of renouncing her son over the telephone (white, naturally) recalls Luise Rainer in "The Great Ziegfeld". Aline MacMahon as Garland's acerbic confidante is like a Joan Blondell or Glenda Farrell. There is a show-must-go-on ending to gratify admirers of "42nd Street".

    Garland's character, Jenny Bowman, is a thinly disguised self-portrait, down to the fluttery neurotic mannerisms (with hints of pill-popping) and the ability to turn around an audience kept waiting an hour past time for her show at the London Palladium- where Garland had sensationally headlined in 1960. After "A Star is Born" Garland, cheated of her rightful Oscar, had withdrawn to concerts and cabaret for almost a decade except for "A Child is Waiting" and her overheated cameo in "Judgement at Nuremberg". Here, for the last time, she essays full-blooded emotional acting against a worthy British opponent (for James Mason, think Dirk Bogarde) and carries it off pretty well, never becoming tiresome and often laughing at her own overwrought persona. She still looks pretty, too, not quite overwhelmed by the blowsiness of her last few years.

    Bogarde, rapidly maturing after his daring role in "Victim", is a superb, challenging foil. Watch how he turns on a sixpence from the surgeon to the ex-lover after reassuring Garland that her throat is okay. His buttoned-up Britishness is never dull; like Ronald Colman, he radiates reliability and sensitivity in a coherent combination. He claimed to have rewritten all his dialogue with Garland during shooting; certainly their exchanges have a cut and thrust which prevents her from chewing the scenery. She has to react as well as posture.

    The fans are given generous dollops of Garland's act in between plot scenes, but these reasonably complement and underscore the themes of defiance and sacrifice. Yes, it's soapy and lush, with daft interludes like the helicopter flight over London. But a touch of Limey stiff upper lip takes the saccharine taste away, and the Ronald Neame of "Tunes of Glory" and "The Poseidon Adventure" knows how to keep a story rolling along. File with contemporary efforts such as "The VIPs" and "The Yellow Rolls-Royce" as an enjoyable wallow, to be taken with boxes of paper handkerchiefs and chocolates.
    didi-5

    The sensational Miss Garland shines again

    Judy's last film ranks among her greatest as she lurches along as Jenny Bowman, grasping, insecure, and in life pretty much washed up. Echoes of Miss Garland's tragic real life cloud this film in places but that only serves to make it more effective. The three songs are superb and I only wish there had been more. Dirk Bogarde gives good support in a performance which by necessity is in the shadow of the tempestuous star. Seems better every viewing and highly recommended for Judy fans.
    7TheLittleSongbird

    Judy Garland's swan song

    Saw 'I Could Go On Singing' as a big lifelong Judy Garland fan (since seeing 'The Wizard of Oz' for the first time at 6 years old) and to see everything that she has done.

    Have always her an amazingly gifted singer with a beautiful voice and near-unsurpassable emotional connection to everything she sings and she to me was a good actress (especially in 'A Star is Born', 'The Wizard of Oz' and 'The Clock', though have really liked/loved her in everything seen of hers and have found a lot to admire for everything seen in films she stars or features in).

    'I Could Go On Singing' is her last film and her swansong, and while Garland does not disappoint by any stretch of the imagination (she is the reason for seeing the film) she did deserve a better final film. 'I Could Go On Singing' is far from bad certainly and has a good deal to admire, but considering the potential and how great its strengths are it is a shame that it wasn't any better.

    Due to Garland's illnesses, the film was finished in a hurry and it does show at times in some rushed-looking production values. Pacing is 'I Could Go On Singing's' biggest issue, with some all too obvious padding especially in the interminably self-indulgent "London travelogue" shots used to make up for when Garland was unavailable to film, those parts especially looked scrappy and should have been cut. The script is uneven, some of it genuinely moving and charming others (and too frequently) daft and melodramatically soapy, especially Dirk Bogarde's.

    However, 'I Could Go On Singing' is mostly attractively photographed and the London Palladium stage gives an appealing sense of nostalgia. The music and songs are wonderful, especially the powerfully staged and performed "By Myself", the equally heartfelt "It Never Was You" and the rousing "Hello Bluebird".

    In terms of standout scenes, the hospital waiting room scene, done in a single take, is particularly fine. It is a painfully honest and heart-breakingly honest scene and one of the greatest examples of improvisational acting on film personally seen, up there with the egg breaking scene in 1962's 'Cape Fear'. Ronald Neame directs admirably and there is enough that is powerful, entertaining and poignant.

    Garland is the best asset other than the music, she is simply sensational and while it may not be her best performance it's to me one of them. She is especially good in the songs and in the hospital waiting room scene where the real her comes out in her character and it is startling in how real it feels and looks. Dirk Bogarde is very good as well, as are Jack Klugman, Aline McMahon and a sympathetic Gregory Phillips.

    All in all, a good film with a significantly greater lead performance. 7/10 Bethany Cox

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    Related interests

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    Music

    Storyline

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    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      Officially regarded as her final film before her death in 1969, Judy Garland filmed it immediately after making A Child Is Waiting (1963) though I Could Go on Singing (1963) was released first. At the time of filming, Garland was going through an ugly child custody battle of her own with her soon-to-be-divorced husband, Sidney Luft. The opportunity to make a film in England with Sir Dirk Bogarde, an actor and friend she had long admired, provided the perfect escape from her problems at home but unfortunately Garland carried her troubles with her across the Atlantic.
    • Goofs
      The elevator scene in the first third of the movie shows a continuous carpet between the elevator floor and the hallway floor, without a break for the moving elevator, indicating that it is not an actual elevator.

      At the same time, you can tell that the elevator operator is squatting toward the front of the elevator, waiting for the partition to rise to make it look like the elevator is coming up from another floor, and as the elevator leaves, you can tell the operator is not moving down with it.
    • Quotes

      Jenny Bowman: You think you can make me sing? Do you think you can - do you think George can make me sing? or Ida? You can get me there, sure, but can you make me sing? I sing for myself. I sing when I want to, whenever I want to, just for me. I sing for my own pleasure. Whenever I want - do you under stand that?

    • Connections
      Edited into Chop Suey (2001)
    • Soundtracks
      I COULD GO ON SINGING
      Music by Harold Arlen

      Lyrics by E.Y. Harburg

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    Details

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    • Release date
      • August 14, 1963 (France)
    • Countries of origin
      • United Kingdom
      • United States
    • Language
      • English
    • Also known as
      • The Lonely Stage
    • Filming locations
      • Canterbury Cathedral, Cathedral House, 11 The Precincts, Canterbury, Kent, England, UK(School Location)
    • Production company
      • Barbican Films
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Tech specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      • 1h 40m(100 min)
    • Color
      • Color
    • Aspect ratio
      • 2.35 : 1

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