A lot of people will recognize the song "I Got Rhythm", written by George and Ira Gershwin. It was from an early 1930s musical called Girl Crazy. You may also recognize that as a film title, as there's a famous Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movie version of Girl Crazy from the 1940s. It's actually not the first movie version of the musical, as there was one a decade earlier that was retooled as a vehicle for Wheeler and Woolsey, of all people. It's also not the last version of the musical, as MGM revived it in the mid-1960s, using the title When the Boys Meet the Girls.
Danny Churchill (Harve Presnell, fresh off a big starring role opposite Debbie Reynolds in The Unsinkable Molly Brown) is a young playboy and student at an all-men's college. He's been given the job of procuring some women for a revue so that the male students don't actually have to go on stage in drag and do a chorus line number. The dean, as well as the attorney for Danny's trust fund, both show up backstage, which causes all sorts of problems since it gets him in the newspapers with absolutely terrible publicity.
The next day, Tess (Sue Ann Langdon), shows up claiming that she's a victim of a breach of promise from Danny. He's been expelled from college, and the stockholders want to take over his father's old firm that's the trust fund. So Danny's lawyer comes up with the brilliant idea that Danny should finish up his graduate degree by going to his father's alma mater, Cody College in the middle of nowhere in Nevada.
On the way out to Nevada, Danny and his friend Sam (Joby Baker) come across a horseback rider, with the horse bucking and eventually throwing the rider. The rider in question turns out to be a woman, Ginger Gray (Connie Francis), who was delivering mail for the US Postal Service. She's delivering the mail because her father Phin (Frank Faylen), the real mailman, is up in Reno gambling again and about to lose the ranch the family lives on.
The first meeting between Danny and Ginger of course goes bad, at least until Danny starts singing "Embraceable You"; Gershiwn tunes are apparently almost as good makeout music as Ravel's "Bolero". Even if you hadn't seen any other version of Girl Crazy, you've probably seen enough of this romantic comedy to know that The Boy and The Girl are eventually going to fall in love. Here, Danny, falling in love with Ginger, feels he needs to come up with some sort of sceme to save the family ranch, which is to turn it into a place where women can stay while waiting for their divorce to go through. I suppose it's something that would be a nice money-spinner at least until other states got the idea to permit no-fault divorce.
When the Boys Meet the Girls was made in 1965, a time when social norms were beginning to change, and movie musicals were beginning to lose steam. One thing MGM tried to do to make this more popular was to include non-Gershwin tunes, from a variety of acts such that moviegoers would like at least one of them. For the teens, there was Herman's Hermits, a British act that was part of the "British Invasion" of pop groups. For women, there was Liberace, and for older viewers in addition to the Gershwin tunes was the presence of Louis Armstrong.
The mishmash doesn't always work, but it's not as bad as review of the time made it out to be. It's hard, after all, to go wrong with George and Ira Gershwin as well as a lot of the supporting cast here.
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