Summer Holiday

A perfectly enjoyable bit of mid-era Freed Unit MGM, with many of the hallmarks of their greatest musicals. But the real surprise in this film is the extended bar room sequence in which Mickey Rooney is led astray by a wanton showgirl named "Belle," played in an extraordinarily vivid way by Marilyn Maxwell. She positively glows in her many extreme close-ups as she tries to vamp Mickey Rooney down the path of corruption. Her Technicolor costume changes color throughout the scene, reflecting Rooney's increasing drunkenness. As mentioned by other reviewers here, the number is sort of a stand-alone scene that seems rather transplanted from another film altogether...but for this viewer, it's a welcomed shot of "oomph", incongruous or not. One is left wondering why it is that Miss Maxwell is largely forgotten today and wasn't really handed any other roles that fulfilled the promise she showed in "Summer Holiday" (with the possible exception of her equally vivid showing in "The Lemon Drop Kid"). She had a long and busy career, mostly in television...yet her name rings few bells today. Could it be that a certain "Norma Jeane Baker," in largely co-opting her name, sort of pulled the rug out from under her in the process? Bottom-line: If you don't want to see the whole film, tune in about halfway through and catch an indelible star-turn by an indelible star: Marilyn Maxwell. It's her film.

Musicalization of Ah! Wilderness is okay with Mickey one of the oldest high school graduates you'll ever see. This was a huge flop upon release and coupled with Rooney's next film Words and Music, also a significant money loser, it signaled the end of his reign as a box office champ and a long slide until he reemerged as a character actor in his up and down career.

It's the supporting cast of Huston, Morgan, Selena Royale and Marilyn Maxwell that make the picture worth seeing. Agnes Moorehead, who looks great in the period costumes, is wasted in the part of Cousin Lily which has been reduced from the original.

Even though it's O'Neill's only comedy the original has touches of drama and pathos all of which have been drained from this. Still a pleasant film with gorgeous color and MGM's accustomed quality production values, the clothes in particular are beautiful, but as musicals go this is minor with no memorable songs nor dances.

If you are a fan of Mickey Rooney, or if you loved "Ah, Wilderness!" (1935 movie) and "Take Me Along" (Broadway musical version of "Ah, Wilderness!"), you will find this version of Eugene O'Neill's only comedy worth seeing.

Mickey Rooney is in both films. In "Summer Holiday," he does a good job as the older brother, but I liked him better as the little brother in the 1935 movie. Butch Jenkins plays the little brother in "Summer Holiday" (the Mickey Rooney role in the 1935 movie). Somebody must have decided the role was not cute enough, so they gave poor little Butch a lot of extra lines and cutesy costumes. Remembering Mickey's robust performance in the earlier version, I found Butch embarrassing.

The music in "Summer Holiday" is not very inspired. "Take Me Along" has better songs. I don't dislike "Summer Holiday." It just doesn't live up to my expectations of it.

There are problems with this big-budget Arthur Freed production, directed by Rouben Mamoulian. It's a musical adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's play, Ah, Wilderness!, which was first filmed by director Clarence Brown in 1935.

There's a good cast. You can't find much fault with people like Selena Royle, Agnes Moorehead, Frank Morgan, etc. But for a big MGM musical, Summer Holiday is underpopulated with song-and-dance talent. Marilyn Maxwell and Gloria DeHaven are real singers. Rooney, in the lead, is not. Huston (who had a hit record of September Song), has a few good musical minutes, but at least one of his songs was cut. And anyway, you can't expect Walter Huston to carry the male singing chores in a screen musical.

Mickey did star in musicals before this. But he probably shouldn't have been expected to carry this kind of film. He was a huge talent, but as a musical lead, he was a different type, a showman (as he proved in the hit Broadway show, Sugar Babies, years later). He wasn't a song and dance man, like Donald O'Connor. You don't find yourself eagerly awaiting his next vocal or dance number.

As for his being too old, he is. But even when he was a lot younger, he just wasn't really the type to pull off this naive, bumptious character. He's a good actor, he tries, and he does well, overall. It's just that I didn't buy it and you probably won't, either.

The songs are good, but they don't have a lot of zing. They're pleasant. The numbers themselves are sometimes truncated. The cuts are rather obvious, at times.

The thing I enjoyed most was the recreation of various American paintings (like Grant Wood's American Gothic) in one sequence. It was both charming and satirical.

By the way, I don't know if anyone else noticed, but director Rouben Mamoulian chose to have the costumes and sets done almost entirely in whites, light grays, tans, and other soft, neutral tones. I'm guessing this was in order to contrast with the film's colorful Omar Kiam fantasy sequence.

But the sequence was cut, resulting in a colorless, drab-looking Technicolor film. Only the scene with Marilyn Maxwell, whose costume becomes more flamboyant the more drunk Mickey Rooney gets, remains as a contrast to all that colorlessness.

Mamoulian was clearly a man of talent, and his cast and technical crew were the finest the studio could provide, so it's a shame to report this film was less than the sum of its parts.

"Ah, Wilderness!" should make a great musical--in fact, it made a very good one on Broadway, as "Take Me Along" in 1959--and this Freed Unit special has some greatness in it, which keeps being undercut. It's beautifully cast, the Technicolor is extraordinary, and the director, the always underrated Rouben Mamoulian, shows a lot of feel for the small-town turn-of-the-century setting and the small crises in the Miller family. But it was a troubled production, and it suffered some ruinous cuts. The editing's frankly sloppy, and misguided things happen that you don't expect to happen in MGM musicals. Mickey Rooney (10 years too old for the part, but he hides it well, and not doing those Mickey Rooney overacting things that often annoy me) and Gloria De Haven (lovely, with a lovely voice) dance fetchingly to "Afraid to Be in Love" on an emerald park lawn, and the number just fades out, no payoff, no resolution. Rooney gets drunk with Marilyn Maxwell in a cheap saloon, and there's supposed to be an Omar Khayam dream ballet (there are production stills), but it doesn't happen, and that scene, too, just fades out. The always-exemplary Walter Huston, who's charming here, rolls up the movie with the curtain line, "Well, spring isn't everything, is it, Essie?", and it's supposed to resonate because he was supposed to sing "Spring Isn't Everything," a sweet ballad similar to the "September Song" Huston introduced in "Knickerbocker Holiday," but that, too, has been cut, so it just seems an odd way to fade out. What's left of the Harry Warren-Ralph Blane score isn't great, but it's quite integrated into the action, and well performed. I caught this again on TCM recently and it's better than I remembered, but I keep wanting it to be better still.