Is every October at the cinema going to turn up a new reason to reflect on the genius of Judy Garland? I shan’t complain if so. A year after Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born remake prompted our revisit to George Cukor’s unimprovable 1954 Garland-starring version, a new biopic puts the embattled icon back in the spotlight. Renée Zellweger delivers a gutsy, all-in tour de force in Judy – but if you want to remember the star through her own performances, the streaming realm turns up a variety of options, some more obvious than others.
The cast-iron classics are easy enough to find: in addition to A Star Is Born, the likes of The Wizard of Oz (if you’ve somehow made it to reading age without seeing it) and Meet Me in St Louis (if your Christmas spirit begins at the first flicker of autumn) are readily available on Amazon, iTunes and so on. (Though not Netflix, which remains something of a Garland-free zone, its search engine offering Christina Aguilera in Burlesque as an alternative. Not quite, guys.)
Yet a lot of Garland’s less canonised films provide just as rich a glimpse of her electricity as a performer. Take the Pirate (streaming on Chili), the least well-tailored of all her MGM musicals. She’s oddly cast as a lovelorn Caribbean ingenue; it was her troubled last collaboration with then-husband Vincente Minnelli, and you can just about feel the nervous tension in its blend of gung-ho romance and bouncy showmanship. Yet moments like its finale, with Garland and Gene Kelly pinging off each other to Cole Porter’s Be a Clown, are pure, exhilarating vaudeville that you wouldn’t trade for anything. Or try the backstage trifle Ziegfeld Girl (on Amazon), which is essentially cinematic pastry doused in chantilly cream – only to surge into something yearning and transcendent when Garland sings I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.
Though some of her best musicals have slipped the UK streaming net (you have to resort to physical media to find Summer Stock, with its film-dwarfing Get Happy number), we’re surprisingly well-supplied with her early Mickey Rooney partnerships – which have quaintly dated in many ways, but are essential in their construction of Garland’s young adult screen persona. Playing a distinctly outsize 12-year-old, she’s not the love interest in 1938’s Love Finds Andy Hardy (on Chili) – a fascinating relic, as a teen romcom made before the mid-century invention of the teenager. But her musical performances are so focus-pulling that it’s no surprise she was teamed with Rooney for a full-blown musical the next year. Babes in Arms (iTunes), with its terminal cutesiness and wince-worthy blackface minstrel sequence, asks for an awful lot of forgiveness these days, but you wouldn’t want Garland’s piercing rendition of I Cried for You to be lost in the wreckage.
I went to the ever-trusty, ever-free Internet Archive, meanwhile, to find Garland’s first wholly songless dramatic performance. The Clock (1945) is worth the hunt. Tenderly charting the 48-hour romance between her New York girl and Robert Walker’s soldier on leave, it was the Before Sunrise of its era, suffused with a wide-eyed but wistful romanticism that came so easily to Garland. Thrilling as she was as a song-and-dance woman, Hollywood should have used her more this way.
The Archive also yields the glorious curio of the Christmas episode of her early-60s TV revue The Judy Garland Show, complete with an auspicious guest spot from teenage daughter Liza Minnelli – save it for later in the season if you like. That said, good old YouTube remains the best place to find other episodes of the show, as well as miscellaneous concert nuggets. An hour-long video of Judy and Liza’s celebrated 1964 London Palladium show is as free as it is priceless – though if any streaming services wish to offer more slickly remastered concert material, it will be gladly received.
New to streaming & DVD this week
Hitsville: The Making of Motown
(Altitude, 15)
A glowing history of the sound-changing record label, made with the participation of its founder, Berry Gordy (right, with Smokey Robinson). Don’t expect any off-message insights; do expect a lot of stunning musical performances from the vaults.
Aniara
(Arrow, 18)
An exhilaratingly ambitious, genuinely original science-fiction parable from Sweden, with intellectual gravitas and an ecological conscience: from a ruined home planet, humanity is being ferried to Mars, but our destructive streak is travelling with us.
Suspiria
(Mubi, 18)
In time for all things Halloween, a belated Blu-ray release for Luca Guadagnino’s contentious but, for this critic, oddly seductive remake of Dario Argento’s giallo classic, replacing original’s stained-glass bloodiness with wintry, camel-coated Berlin mood.
A Journey to the Beginning of Time
(Second Run, PG)
Czech animator Karel Zeman has been cited as an influence by the likes of Jan Švankmajer and Terry Gilliam. Beautifully restored for Blu-ray, this time-travelling 1955 dino-spectacle mixes animation and animatronics to enchanting effect.
