The “unspeakably wretched” movie Judy Garland missed 99 days of shooting on
“Give the people what they want”, as the song by the O’Jays goes, and that’s certainly what Hollywood studio execs did back in 1948 when they brought together two of the world’s most talented stars in the form of Judy Garland and Gene Kelly for a blockbuster movie that proved anything but simple to make.
Kelly had yet to make Singin’ in the Rain, the 1952 film that wrote his name in movie history, but he had already been Academy Award-nominated for 1945’s Anchors Aweigh and was seen as a uniquely talented dancer. Garland, meanwhile, was not just a movie star thanks to the enormous success of The Wizard of Oz in 1939, but a recording star too, releasing a chart-topping album in 1944.
While Kelly and Garland had been seen on screen before, in Kelly’s debut, For Me and My Gal, in 1942, the new movie was to be on a much bigger scale. It was a swashbuckling musical called The Pirate, and was based on a hit Broadway play, with Garland’s husband Vincente Minnelli on directing duties. The legendary musician Cole Porter was paid a fortune back then of $100k to write songs for the movie, and a budget of almost $4million was agreed.
Unfortunately, there were significant problems right from the off. The initial script had to be abandoned, which delayed filming by months. Then, when the production began, the musical director and Garland were dismayed by the arrangement of the opening number and ordered it to be rewritten, along with several more scenes for Kelly, who Minnelli wanted to have more screen time.
The director also had exacting ideas on what he wanted the film to look like, leading to lavish new sets being built at huge cost. But that was almost inconsequential compared to the problems the lead star, Garland, was experiencing. She was suffering from post-partum depression, exhaustion, was smoking four packs of cigarettes a day, got addicted to barbiturates, and often wouldn’t show up for filming at all. She would eventually miss 99 days of the total 120 days of shooting and, at one point, collapsed on set, having to be hospitalised for two weeks.
Her marriage to the director also began to unravel, while Kelly accused one of his co-stars of not learning the film’s dances properly. Adding to that, the choreography that was present in the film was so sexually suggestive for the time that when Louis B Mayer, the co-founder of MGM studios, saw the footage of a number called ‘Voodoo’, he ordered the negatives to be burned, warning that they would be in danger of being raided by the police.
When the movie was eventually released, it was a huge flop with audiences, losing the studio millions of dollars, although it fared much better with critics and the score was nominated for an Academy Award. That did little to persuade Cole Porter from his disgust at the results, however, declaring that the film was “a $5,000,000 Hollywood picture that was unspeakably wretched, the worst that money could buy”.
Kelly, meanwhile, summed the experience up by saying: “It didn’t occur to us until the picture hit the public that what we had done was indulge in a huge inside joke. It was done tongue-in-cheek, but it didn’t really come off, and that’s my fault. But I thought Judy was superb – and what Minnelli did with color and design in that film is as fine as anything that has ever been done.”
