C'Mon Get Happy - The Making of 'Summer Stock'
The 1950 film Summer Stock isn’t ranked with the great musicals of Hollywood’s Golden Age. It’s no Wizard of Oz or Singin’ in the Rain. Perhaps encouraged by its modest place in cinema history as a subject less explored, David Fantle and Tom Johnson have written the book on the movie. C’mon, Get Happy: The Making of Summer Stock explores the making of the third and final paring of Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, a story the authors describe as having “enough drama, heartache, and genuine selflessness to fuel the plots of a score of MGM melodramas.”
Summer Stock also turned out to be the end of the yellow brick road for MGM’s brightest star and is duly noted in most film histories as Garland’s final movie for the studio that shaped her image and helped misshape her life. One of C’mon, Get Happy’s tasks is to debunk the oft-told rumors that Garland, struggling psychologically, was the reason for Summer Stock’s many production delays. Turns out, she was only one of several reasons.
The authors concede that the plot of Summer Stock “wouldn’t overly tax the gray matter of audiences, much less the screenwriters who concocted it.” But they base their brief for raising the movie’s stature on superb song and dance numbers by Garland and Kelly and, of course, the songs themselves. “Get Happy,” a last-minute addition to the production, “remains at the very top of the Garland canon along with ‘Over the Rainbow’ and ‘The Man that Got Away.’”
C’mon, Get Happy provides succinct overviews of the production’s main players before digging into the production itself, clearing up old tales and providing many interesting insights into attitudes and backstage politics in old Hollywood just as the studio system was about to disintegrate.
C’mon, Get Happy: The Making of Summer Stock is published by the University of Mississippi Press. David Fantle is adjunct professor of film at Marquette University and Tom Johnson is former senior editor at Netflix. Previously, they coauthored Hollywood Heyday: 75 Candid Interviews with Golden Age Legends.
David Fantle will give a presentation on C’mon, Get Happy at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 13 at the SE Wisconsin Festival of Books on the UW-Milwaukee Waukesha Campus; and 1 p.m., Sunday Oct. 15 at the Jewish Community Center, 6255 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Whitefish Bay.
