Judy Garland @ 100: "The Pirate"

Team Experience is revisiting a dozen Judy Garland movies for her Centennial. Here’s Baby Clyde on her most infamous picture... 

Get Judy and Gene at the peak of their movie star appeal, allow Vincente Minnelli to go as ‘Vincente Minelli’ as he pleases, hire the world’s greatest songwriter to provide the tunes, script by the same team behind The Thin Man and It’s A Wonderful Life, sets by Cedric Gibbons, costumes by Irene, all presided over by the fabled Freed Unit. What could possibly go wrong?

The Pirate, that’s what. A great big glorious, Technicolor mess. And I love it...

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Judy Garland @ 100: 'Easter Parade'

Team Experience is revisiting a dozen Judy Garland movies for her Centennial. Here’s Mark Brinkerhoff on one of her most popular pictures...   

Judy Garland: physical comedienne. This may not be the descriptor that comes to mind when it comes to the one, the only, The Voice. But as superlatives go, it’s the one that fits like a dainty, sturdy little glove on the hand of a one-of-a-kind talent in her very prime.

At 26 (and newly a first-time mom to then-baby Liza), Garland, less than a decade removed from her superstar-making performance in The Wizard of Oz, was reemerging in MGM musicals with a proto-Barbra-Streisand-as-Fanny-Brice performance in what would become her second biggest hit of the ‘40s (following mega-musical, Meet Me in St Louis, four years earlier). Easter Parade is a Funny Girl period-adjacent set tale of a novice singer-dancer plucked from obscurity by a storied showman...

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Judy Garland @ 100: "Babes on Broadway"

Team Experience is revisiting a dozen Judy Garland movies for her Centennial. Here's Nathaniel R...

A behind the scenes shot of Judy's first scene in "Babes on Broadway". She's a fountain of tears in the scene but laughing between takes.

History has a way of shifting truth from facts to a more universally agreed upon fiction. Though The Wizard of Oz is now the movie most associated with Judy Garland, it was not as universally beloved in 1939 when it first premiered. Though it was ostensibly "a hit," the sixth highest grosser of Hollywood's most mythic year, it also carried the whiff of failure since its large budget prevented initial profits. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayor got a much much bigger immediate return on their Garland investment through her other 1939 musical. Babes in Arms (1939) opened just two months after Oz and proved a slightly bigger hit (again "at the time"). The Wizard of Oz proved that Judy could carry a massive picture all on her own but as follow up, the studio didn't get ambitious but reverted to the easier sell -- more "Mickey & Judy!'; Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940), Strike Up the Band (1940), Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941) and today's topic Babes on Broadway (1942) followed... 

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Judy Garland @ 100: "The Clock"

by Eurocheese

After the milestone of her smash hit Meet Me in St. Louis, having proved herself as a now adult leading lady, where would Judy head next? She decided to build up her acting cred with her first purely dramatic role in The Clock, a romance wherein Garland’s character Alice falls for a soldier on leave in New York City. It’s not surprising that audiences at the time were expecting her to sing (she always had before), especially since the music swells in several moments as if she's about to do so. Despite the lack of songs, critics at the time appreciated the film's sweet tone and it's hard not to get swept up in the couple’s earnest romance.

Garland had struggled with addiction for years, but as she fought to maintain her weight and supported co-star Robert Walker as he drank his way through his deteriorating marriage, her addiction grew...

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Judy Garland @ 100: "Meet Me In St. Louis"

Team Experience is revisiting a dozen Judy Garland movies for her Centennial. Here’s Ben Miller discussing her biggest hit...

Meet Me In St. Louis marked a number of notable events in Judy Garland’s life. Her love affair and eventual marriage to director Vincent Minnelli came from filming. The film itself was Garland’s biggest box office success in initial release, becoming the second most popular film of 1944 (behind only the Best Picture winner Going My Way). But more than anything else the film completed Garland's transition from teen stardom to adult roles. In Meet Me in St Louis Garland was at the absolute peak of her star power and on-screen magnetism...

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