Why a book about Summer Stock? That’s the question we received, often with a quizzical look, from many people—directors, actors, musicologists, and even hard-core fans of musicals—when we said we were writing C’mon, Get Happy: The Making of Summer Stock. The book is about the 1950 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios musical film, which starred Judy Garland and Gene Kelly and that many felt was a bit old-fashioned even upon its release, more than 70 years ago.
In fact, no less a legend than Broadway producer-director Hal Prince questioned our choice of Summer Stock as the subject for a book in an e-mail to us not long before he died, in 2019. We had reached out for comment from Prince’s wife, Judy, the daughter of Saul Chaplin, who served as one of the music directors and composers on Summer Stock.
“I saw Summer Stock and I’m fascinated that you should want it as a centerpiece in your book,” Prince wrote. “Obviously, or perhaps obviously for us, ‘Get Happy’ [a showstopping number performed by Garland in the movie] was essentially an appendage to that film, and in every respect a brilliant one. Saul’s work was consummate, Judy Garland looked glorious, and the staging looked perfect. It’s a sort of schizoid project, is it not?”
Schizoid or not, we didn’t rightly know exactly where our research would take us when we embarked on the project, four years ago. Admittedly, Summer Stock is not in the same league as other MGM musicals from the studio’s heyday, made mostly under the tutelage of the studio’s best-known producer of musicals, Arthur Freed, who was behind Meet Me in St. Louis, Easter Parade, An American in Paris, and Singin’ in the Rain.
Summer Stock was produced by Joe Pasternak, a jovial Hungarian Jew with a penchant for confounding malaprops, who gave the world consistent box-office hits starring Deanna Durbin and Kathryn Grayson, and a few Mario Lanza operatic confections. He almost always made a movie where the end credits followed a feel-good conclusion that just played out.
“It’s a sort of schizoid project, is it not?”
The feel-good conclusion that Summer Stock shares with other Pasternak films was one of the dichotomies we uncovered—one that directly relates to the producer’s own life. With the Nazi scourge looming large in the mid-1930s, Pasternak, who had left his native country years earlier, pleaded with his father, sister, and other family members to leave Hungary, but it was futile; Pasternak continued to work in Hollywood knowing that he would never see his family again.
From May 15 to July 9, 1944, the Hungarian military, per German SS officials’ instructions, deported around 440,000 Jews from the country. Most of them were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the majority of them were killed in gas chambers. Thirty-one Hungarians with the last name of Pasternak (Joe’s family certainly among them) were murdered at Auschwitz during that time.
Interviews with Pasternak’s son Jeff, and one of his father’s discoveries, the singer Connie Francis, whom he cast in the 1960 film that launched the beach-film craze, Where the Boys Are, painted a more insightful and darker story than he shared in his frothy 1956 autobiography, Easy the Hard Way. His happy-ending pictures were informed, in part, by a response to that overwhelming personal tragedy that engulfed him.
Summer Stock, in all its effervescence, innocence, and good humor, stands as a prime example of the producer’s abiding credo that people in general, and filmgoers in particular, should, like he did, shouldering his own melancholy burdens, just get on with it and get happy.
Joe Pasternak’s happy-ending pictures were informed, in part, by a response to that overwhelming personal tragedy that engulfed him.
Another dichotomy—indeed, a myth with a tenacious grip in the minds of many to this day—is that a troubled Judy Garland was the reason why Summer Stock ran over-budget and took longer to shoot than other musicals made at the time. It has become gospel in almost every book that references Summer Stock to charge Garland as the sole reason for the delays that affected the film’s production. In fact, there were many delays that far superseded Garland’s absences from the set, including the time needed to write, arrange, record, and film new songs that were added later in the production, and the shooting of two solo numbers for Garland and Kelly, which occurred a few weeks after the film had officially wrapped.
After 15 years and more than two dozen films, 90 singles for Decca, several hundred radio shows, World War II bond and servicemen shows, an abortion, a failed marriage, being more or less a single mother to a three-year-old child (Liza), and having a less than satisfactory second husband in Vincente Minnelli, Garland’s life was cratering. Summer Stock would be her final movie at MGM before the studio terminated her contract. She was 27 during the filming, and, frankly, it’s dumbfounding why she wasn’t AWOL from the set more often.
Although Summer Stock isn’t high up in the pantheon of MGM’s greatest musicals, interviews with such artists as Savion Glover (who wrote the foreword), Lorna Luft, Michael Feinstein, Tommy Tune, Marilyn Michaels, Mario Cantone, Ben Vereen, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and others convinced us that the film, despite all of its dichotomies (and maybe because of them), warranted a closer look.
David Fantle and Tom Johnson’s C’mon, Get Happy is out now from University Press of Mississippi