THE HARVEY GIRLS ***1/2
George Sidney1946
IDEA: En route to Arizona to marry a man she's never met, a young woman falls in with a group of waitresses working for the famed Harvey House hospitality chain.
BLURB: Despite its low profile in the canon of MGM musicals, The Harvey Girls is among the heartiest and most satisfying of the films created for the studio by the Arthur Freed unit. On a cinematographic level alone, Sidney’s tuneful Western is several cuts above the standard 1940s crop. From the rousing, geography-trotting company performance of “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” to the sinuous craning shots that ascend a balcony or zigzag across a ballroom floor, The Harvey Girls feels like a genuine work of film art, its musical strengths supported and elevated by its considerable formal panache. It helps, too, that the film features a dynamite ensemble cast working as both a fluid, evenly showcased collective and as an elegantly delineated community of idiosyncratic individuals, each with their time to shine. Within its milieu, The Harvey Girls ennobles its titular waitresses and, in its way, the showgirls with whom they compete for business, offering a generous celebration of the historical importance of women in the service industry. It might be a bit of a stretch to identify in this anything more than the germs of a proto-feminist ideology, but the attention to politics is itself a welcome dimension, making a grand Hollywood entertainment that has so many other plates spinning effortlessly - Comedy! Romance! Action! Melodrama! - all the richer.
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