Judy Garland @ 100: "I Could Go On Singing"

Team Experience revisited nine Judy Garland movies for her Centennial. Here's Nick Taylor on her final film.

Judy’s last film was always going to be an event. Released six years before her death to positive reviews but poor box office, I Could Go On Singing plays like a morbid echo of her final months. But for all the film’s metatextual readings into Garland’s life and career, this isn’t a self-conscious reckoning or farewell from a beloved star to her audience. Her regular talk of staging yet another comeback, even after her brief and very publically heralded casting in Valley of the Dolls before being canned by the studio, gives I Could Go On Singing an aura of lost time and unrealized potential heavier than the film’s bittersweet ending implies. I Could Go On Singing leaves Garland as alone as she’s ever been but still singing with all her heart, and it’s a shame she never got to strut it for the camera again...

But what of the film itself, which has the plot of top-flight melodrama but is shot with a washed-out color scheme and empty frames that make the whole thing feel purposefully diffused? Ronald Neame, who would orchestrate a larger ensemble to more precise tonalities in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie several years later, successfully keeps I Could Go On Singing from ballooning into histrionics but doesn’t fill the self-consciously bigger or colorful moments with more complexity. And more importantly, what of Judy Garland, whose performance as Jenny Bowman, a renowned concert singer battling addiction and reckoning with a family she’d abandoned to further pursue her career, cannot have been easy or comfortable to inhabit? Well...

Jenny’s latest world tour has brought her to London for an extended stay, and early in her visit she makes an impromptu visit to the home office of Dr. David Donne (Dirk Bogarde) under the premise of discussing treatment for her voice. Her voice does need care, after so much singing and drinking to wear it down, but of course she’s there for something else. Jenny and David had a secret, passionate affair over a decade ago that produced a child nobody else knows about. David agreed to raise the baby with his wife while Jenny left to nurture her rising career, on the condition that she never meet her son. David’s wife passed away several months ago, and Jenny sees this stint in London as a new chance to reconnect with the love she’d never forgotten and the child she’d never met.

Garland and Bogarde do wonders together, in both the long reintroduction that covers the first 15 minutes of I Could Go On Singing (or the first 30, if we count David introducing Jenny to their son) and in the shorter but no less riveting hospital room climax that leads into the film’s final number. From the moment they lay eyes on each other, both characters are overwhelmed by romantic memories. It’s been years since they last spoke, but one look shows how deeply they’ve thought about each other every single day of their lives. Bogarde apparently rewrote a majority of Garland's dialogue with her consent, and one wonders how much their onscreen chemistry (and frankly her whole characterization) benefitted from this.

But once Jenny asks to conduct their appointment in David’s parlor, their ardor is quickly overtaken by more complicated feelings. David’s tenderness gives way to a rigid, snidely aloof professionalism during her appointment, and Jenny responds with quietly despondent pouting, impatiently waiting for him to start noticing her. Garland’s talent for holding melodramatically crackling emotions amidst mundane ephemera keeps these scenes hotwired amidst Neame’s undemonstrative style. I love how annoyed Garland is at the mere presence of a nurse flitting behind her during the appointment, a flesh-and-blood reminder that she has to suffer being David’s patient before they can properly acknowledge their history. When she finally gets him alone, Garland luxuriates in memories of better days as lucidly as she carries the regrets that have haunted Jenny for years.

David eventually does let her visit their son Matt (Gregory Phillips) at his boarding school, under the condition that he not learn his parentage, and the three spend the day together touring his school. Matt invites her to see his school musical, a staging of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore where Matt and half his classmates are dolled up as English women of high society. Jenny visits Matt backstage after the show, and we get to my absolute favorite sequence in the whole film, where she leads the entire cast and tech crew in a rendition of the repetitious “Sir Joseph Porter’s Song”. For all of Garland’s innate star power, she’s a terrifically interactive scene partner. Riffing with the kids as a group and one-on-one with a handful of them, playing off their giggling enthusiasm at singing with a real life celebrity while teasing them back to life when their energy wanes, it’s a delightful showcase of Garland’s best, most collaborative talents. This kind of spontaneity and liveliness is rare in I Could Go On Singing, and the unabashed fun does wonders for the film and its star.

The next day, David is unexpectedly called away on doctor business, and after separately telling both Jenny and Matt they shouldn’t see each other, the two spend several days frolicking around London. The middle half hour of I Could Go On Singing is devoted to their blossoming companionship, as Jenny fills the time by taking Matt on walks and helicopter flights and giving him choice seats to her concerts. Garland doesn’t overplay this attachment as an addict high on a new fix or a long-gone but caring mother over-indulging her newly reunited child, though these threads are always present. She even confesses to treating Matt like the child she never had, which Garland admits in the way one is fairly straightforward to a child. Yet Garland doesn’t premise the performance on Jenny’s maternal instincts or addictive personality. Instead, she centers Jenny’s aching loneliness, her need to love and be loved in return for who she is and the choices she’s made. As Dorothea Fields might phrase it, Garland plays these interactions as Jenny learning who her son is as a person out in the world and asking to be recognized on the same grounds, and she treasures it more than anything.

But even this period of joy and new possibilities is still marked by isolation. Albert Ibbetson’s cinematography, with harsh lighting that frequently applies a bone-white contour onto Garland’s face, retains a washed-out color palette and keeps the incredibly wide frame from ever feeling full. When Jenny performs for her concerts, I Could Go On Singing drowns itself and Garland in bold punches of color but still leaves her without the kind of scaffolding Minelli, Walters, and Cukor gave her. Garland is left to play to a mostly unseen audience on a huge stage in some of the worst outfits I’ve ever seen her wear, and Neame’s camera varies just enough to help her emotional impact of these scenes without alieviating the sense that she's been somewhat stranded. 

Whether these strategies and contrasts register as simple or underthought likely depends on the viewer. Yet more than anywhere else in I Could Go On Singing, these scenes emphasize how crucial Garland’s cinematic charisma and celebrity persona have been to making this film a worthwhile experience. One could imagine a “better” version of this performance where the actress keeps a tighter hold on Jenny’s drinking and her possibly damaged voice - two plot threads the film regularly gestures towards without awarding them meaningful space, and which Garland mostly evokes through her own frayed energy. Garland’s legacy of personal trauma haunts much of her role, but I Could Go On Singing would collapse into lurid sensationalism if this history was the only thig powering it. Garland was a consummately talented actress, and she gives the film an identity and heft no one else could have. Her climactic conversation with David Bogarde's character strikes at the intersection of an autopsy of their relationship, a release from old ghosts, a pep talk, and a promise for better days that the recipient seems to appreciate rather than believe. Garland holds all of these threads together beautifully and carries them into her final number with heartbreaking power. It's exactly the right mix of optimistic triumph and bitter farewell for the film to end on, and it sits like a rock in your gut as Garland fades to black on the silver screen for the very last time. 

More from Judy's Centennial here at The Film Experience:

• The Wizard of Oz (1939)
• Babes on Broadway (1942)
• Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
• The Clock (1945)
• Easter Parade (1948)
• The Pirate (1948)
• Summer Stock (1950)
• A Star is Born (1954)
• Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

Comments

[joel6]

I see the various things you point to (especially her wardrobe....geesh what was Edith Head drinking at the sketch table!) but love the film warts and all.

I don't know if the intent was to make the audience feel Jenny's isolation (the original title-The Lonely Stage makes me think maybe so) but from what we're shown Jenny IS isolated with only the reliable Ida (a wonderful Aline MacMahon) and the grumpily excitable George (Jack Klugman who shares a nice chemistry with Judy) as constants in her world.

The film is well-cast all the way around. Not only does she work well with the aforementioned duo and Dirk Bogarde but most importantly for the story she connects with Gregory Phillips as Matt. If they hadn't the whole picture would be meaningless.

The songs she's handed as a group aren't the best crop she ever had, though her rendering of "It Never Was You" with the cameras slow approach is beautiful in it's simple power, but she makes them better as only a truly gifted singer can.

It would have been great had she been able to do more films (though Thank God she wasn't able to do Valley of the Dolls!) but this as a cinematic swan song is certainly a respectable exit. Also wonderful that it wraps up in a completely appropriate way with Judy arms outstretched singing to the heavens.

Loved this whole retrospective!!!

[Mr Ripley79]

Did I miss the A Child is Waiting review.

[Richard]

Where can I watch this film??