Judy by the Numbers: "Look For The Silver Lining"
Wednesday, June 15, 2016 at 8:00AM Anne Marie is tracking Judy Garland's career through musical numbers...
Believe it or not, 1946 actually represented a change of pace in Judy Garland's career. Judy only had three credits to her name that year: one starring role (The Harvey Girls), one cameo delayed by reshoots (Ziegfeld Follies), and one appearance in a biopic (Till The Clouds Roll By). In fact, this change of pace was a conscious choice on the part of Mr. & Mrs. Minnelli. If Judy looks like she's glowing a bit more than usual under those arclights, that's because Judy Garland was pregnant.
The Movie: Till The Clouds Roll By (1946)
The Songwriter: Jerome Kern (music), Buddy G. DeSylva (lyrics)
The Players: Judy Garland, Robert Walker, Van Heflin, June Allyson, Lucille Bremer, directed by Richard Whorf & Vincente Minnelli
The Story: Till The Clouds Roll By is a Jerome Kern biopic, which (in the true MGM style) fabricates or glosses over nearly all of the composer's life in favor of a Technicolor musical extravaganza. Judy plays Marilyn Miller, a megawatt Ziegfeld Follies star whose heyday was encompassed the 1920s. At her peak, Miller had had musicals and songs written for her on Broadway, including "Look For The Silver Lining," from Kern's musical Sally. Miller was even beginning to break into Hollywood when illness, substance abuse, and alcoholism forced her into retirement in the early 1930s. Marilyn Miller died in 1936 at age 37, another sad showbusiness story. None of this makes it into the movie, though. Besides, Judy was so focused on the upcoming birth that she may have missed the all-to-prescient warning of the woman she portrayed.
When Garland filmed her two songs for the Jerome Kern biopic, she was already four months pregnant. MGM covered up the pregnancy by fitting her clothes a little looser, and inserting a sink, some dishes (and some dancers' hands) between Judy and the camera. Five months later (nine months before the movie was released) Judy and Vincente welcomed into the world a bouncing baby talent: Liza May Minnelli.
Reader Comments (2)
I always thought this was a curious number…granted Judy was pregnant, but is this a replica of what might have been the Ziegfeld staging?
These start my Wednesday mornings. She looks so happy.
A lovely song which she performs beautifully. I've heard the story that they camouflaged her expanding belly with the dishes and the sink. Apparently though this is the way Marilyn Miller performed it on Broadway so it worked to the filmmakers benefit while probably being one of the few things that are accurate in the movie, a hodgepodge of sentimental goo for the most part.
Sentimental goo it maybe but it does have some nice numbers. Angela Lansbury's "How'd Ya Like to Spoon with Me?" Lena Horne's "Why Was I Born?", June Allyson's "Cleopatterer" and several others but they are linked together with sloppy dull scenes with a curiously disengaged Robert Walker playing Kern.
Judy's two numbers were directed by an uncredited Vincente Minnelli and they do have a certain snap not wholly in evidence in the rest of the film. I love her other number "Who?" which she found hysterical being in her condition and dancing through a crowd of men asking Who? stole her heart away!
Trivia note-Ben Lyon, a popular actor in silents and early sound films, appearing in Wings among others, was a friend of Marilyn Miller. Eventually he gave up acting and went to work as a casting director at 20th Century Fox where he advised a young starlet's that her given name was unsatisfactory for films and said she reminded him of Marilyn Miller and suggested she take that as her stage name. She said she could never take the full name of someone else who died but would pair her mother's maiden name Monroe with the first name Marilyn thus becoming Marilyn Monroe. Ironically when she died owing to her final marriage her legal name WAS Marilyn Miller. They were even close in age at the time of their respective passings, Miller 37 and Monroe 36.