The Harvey Girls

I generally try to avoid doing posts on multiple films with the same star in close succession. Every now and then, however, the films on my DVR that are showing up on TCM happen to include a pair with the same star. That happens again this week; a few days back I posted on The Pirate, and now The Harvey Girls is showing up on TCM tomorrow, June 10, at 3:15 PM as part of a birthday salute to Judy Garland.

Opening title cards inform us of what the Harvey Girls were, which is a good thing because while a few people still living in 1946 when the movie was released might have remembered Harvey Girls, audiences today wouldn't. Fred Harvey was a freight agent for one of the railroads back in the 1870s who had the idea of setting up a series of restaurants at those stations along the line where the trains stopped long enough for passengers to eat. The restaurants became known as Harvey Houses, and employed unmarried women who were required to fit a squeaky-clean image in exchange for good-for-the-era pay.

As the movie opens, Judy Garland is not one of the Harvey Girls, but instead a young woman named Susan Bradley who is traveling west to the town of Sandrock to meet the man she's going to marry, having corresponded with him by letter. Also on the train is a new set of Harvey Girls managed by Sonora Cassidy (Marjorie Main). Susan gets off at the same town where the new Harvey House is being built, and finds that the putative man of her dreams is no such thing, but a drinker and old coot named Hartsey (Chill Wills). She doesn't want to marry him now, and thankfully Hartsey is OK with that, telling Susan that the love letters were written as a sort of joke by Ned Trent (John Hodiak).

Ned Trent runs the local den of iniquity, a saloon with dancing girls called the Alhambra, and Susan is so pissed with him that she vows to become a Harvey Girl herself and help drive the Alhambra out of business by bringing Harvey House civilization to Sandrock. Ned and his friend Judge Purvis (Preston Foster) plot to put the Harvey House out of business, but of course Ned eventually finds himself falling in love with Susan. Complicating matters is the fact that the head of the Alhambra dancing girls, Em (Angela Lansbury), is in love with Ned.

It all leads to the predictable conclusion, but with a bunch of musical numbers along the way because audiences expected that from a Judy Garland movie. Indeed, when we first see Garland on board the train she's singing a song. The musical numbers are certainly well-done and lively, although as many of you may know I'm not the biggest fan of Judy Garland musicals. It's easy to see, though, why Garland fans and audiences of the day would enjoy The Harvey Girls.