For Me and My Gal (Snap Case) Review

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(More customer reviews)Three years after she rocketed to superstardom in The Wizard of Oz, Little Judy Garland was all grown up and more than ready to assume her first truly adult leading role; for his part, Gene Kelly, having just wowed audiences on Broadway in Pal Joey, was ready to make his feature film debut. Garland and Kelly made a natural match, demonstrating great chemistry together from the very start. For Me and My Gal is just a wonderful film, featuring dancing, singing, romance, heartache, joy, pain, and just about every emotion under the sun, oftentimes swinging in mood at the drop of a hat from euphoria to misery. A nervous Gene Kelly credited Judy for pulling him through the production of this his first film, and in all truth Judy turns in an outstanding performance here. The movie, released in 1942, is in many ways tied to the contemporary war effort at home, and while it may be a definite product of its era, its themes and unforgettable performances make it a film that will live and be watched and certainly enjoyed forever.
For Me and My Gal is also a tribute to the great vaudeville tradition, a tradition Judy Garland knew quite well first-hand from her childhood spent on the stage. Garland plays Jo Hayden, a vaudevillian singer/dancer working to pay for her brother's education. Teamed up with Jimmy Metcalf and his gang, she is successful enough but far removed from the dream of every vaudeville performer of playing The Palace. As the movie opens, she meets up with Harry Palmer (Gene Kelly), an entertainer so vain that Jo dislikes him immediately, even saying at one point, "I bet he takes a bow every time he hears a clap of thunder." Palmer wants nothing more than to get ahead, to get to The Palace, and he sees potential in the young Jo Hayden. When his initial business proposals to her go nowhere fast, he turns on the charm and, before you know it, they are singing and dancing beautifully together to the tune of For Me and My Gal. Jimmy Metcalf loves Jo, but he breaks up his own act in order to make Jo take Harry's offer. The new duo of Palmer and Hayden find success, but not the kind they are yearning for, as we watch them perform a number of great song and dance routines on stage, the most familiar of which is probably When You Wore a Tulip (And I Wore A Big Red Rose). Whenever things start going well, though, something bad happens. Jo is all torn up when Palmer starts spending all his free time with the famous singer Eve Minard, as Palmer has yet to figure out that he loves Jo as much as Jo loves him. When this hurdle is passed, the road ahead for the duo only gets rougher as war intervenes. Having finally secured a spot at The Palace, Palmer takes drastic action to avoid being drafted, but his rash act backfires on him in the worst way possible. The ending of the film concentrates as much on helping the war effort and patriotism as it does restoring, in quite a tender manner, the love and commitment of two people who belong together.
Harry Palmer surely was meant to represent a lot of American men in wartime. Caught up in his own hopes and dreams, he ignores what is going on in Europe, then tries to find a way out of answering his draft summons when it inevitably comes. He learns that there are much more important things in life than performing at The Palace and that a man has a duty to serve his country when called upon, in whatever capacity he is capable of serving. Judy Garland's patriotic song and dance sequences and the real-life armed service radio broadcasts she appeared on throughout the early 1940s made her a pin-up girl of World War II. Definitely, this film carried a message to movie audiences to do what they could to support the troops going to war yet again, but its greatest power is wrung from the soul of Judy Garland in the form of many touching, dramatically powerful scenes of loss and heartache. For Me and My Gal, despite a great measure of comedy and delightful song and dance, follows a dark road at times, making it a movie that truly spans the entire spectrum of human emotion. It's impossible not to love this movie, and the fact that it delivers Gene Kelly's film debut and Judy's first truly adult dramatic role makes it all the more important and special.

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Gene Kelly makes his film debut in this WW I musical playing a man who deliberately injures his hand to avoid being drafted into the army. He starts a vaudeville act with a young woman and they become determined to play The Palace.

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