Summer Stock, a.k.a. If You Feel Like Singing (MGM, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (June 16) afternoon I watched a comfortable old favorite of mine on Turner Classic Movies: Summer Stock (1950), Judy Garland’s last film as an MGM contract player. It’s an old-fashioned backstage musical of the type Garland and Mickey Rooney had been making at MGM a decade earlier (Babes in Arms, Strike Up the Band, Babes on Broadway), and both she and her co-star, Gene Kelly, were looking ahead to much stronger and more ground-breaking projects: Judy to A Star Is Born and Kelly to An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain. The plot, concocted by writers Sy Gomberg and George Wells and directed by one of Judy’s Gay friends, Charles Walters, casts Judy as New England farm woman Jane Falbury, who’s running her old family’s farm in collaboration with her aunt Esmeralda, known as “Esmé” (Marjorie Main, who practically steals this movie!). Jasper G. Wingait (Ray Collins), the richest man in town, is determined that Jane marry his son Orville (Eddie Bracken, playing a thoroughly annoying comic-relief character; Preston Sturges did wonderful things with him in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero, but Walters, Gomberg, and Wells were hardly at Sturges’ level of talent, skill, or audacity) to reunite the two pioneering families that first settled this village in colonial times. The complications arise when Jane’s sister Abigail (Gloria DeHaven) shows up with a company of New York stage actors in tow. Abigail has been desperate to escape the farming community and borrowed money to go to college, then bailed out after a year, and has progressively tried writing and painting before settling on a career as an actress. She has fallen in love with Joe Ross (Gene Kelly), a singer, dancer, choreographer, and director who’s rehearsing a new show he wants to take to Broadway.

Without telling Jane in advance, Abigail invites Ross and his whole troupe to move into the Falbury barn and rehearse their show there. The film begins with Jane’s two farmhands, Zeb (Erville Alderson) and Frank (Paul E. Burns), announcing that because she hasn’t been able to pay them, they’re quitting to take factory jobs in the big city – and damned if it doesn’t look like we’ve been flashed back to the opening of The Wizard of Oz. Jane manages to talk Jasper Wingait into granting her a tractor with the understanding that she’ll be able to pay for it when her big harvest comes in, and she opens the film by belting out two songs, “If You Feel Like Singing, Sing” (which she starts naked in the shower – one wonders if the writers were inspired by the big scene in South Pacific in which Mary Martin sang “A Wonderful Guy” in her shower – and it’s amusing how Walters is able to maneuver Robert H. Planck’s camera to avoid showing more of Judy than the Production Code would allow) and “(Howdy Neighbor) Happy Harvest,” her ode to agriculture which she sings while driving the tractor to and around her farm. The song contains the embarrassing lyric, “When you work for Mother Nature/You’ll be paid by Father Time” – not one of the better efforts from composer Harry Warren (who’d “made his bones” in Hollywood with the sophisticated songs for the 1930’s Busby Berkeley musicals) and lyricist Mack Gordon. The moment Jane shows up with that tractor, we know that it’s going to be wrecked at some point in the story, and at first we think Jane is going to be the one who wrecked it. Later it turns out to be Joe’s comic-relief sidekick Herb Blake (Phil Silvers, one of that odd group of actors that had indifferent careers as character players in 1940’s movies but became stars on early TV: others include Lucille Ball, Milton Berle, Raymond Burr, and Jackie Gleason), who was using the tractor to pull a tree stump, lost control and totally crashed it.

Esmé lays down the law to the actors and crew: she’ll let them stay on the farm, but only if they get up at 6 a.m. and do farm labor – which leads the writers to a lot of fish-out-of-water gags as they vainly try to milk cows, feed hogs, and collect eggs. Ultimately Abigail gets a bad case of diva-itis and runs off to Broadway with Harrison I. Keath (Hans Conried, voice-doubled by Pete Roberts), her partner in an incredibly pretentious song called “Mem’ry Island” (written by Warren and Gordon with tongues very firmly in cheeks) that sounds like it wandered in from a Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy movie. In a plot twist that adds 42nd Street to the long, embarrassing list of other movies this one rips off, Joe Ross invites Jane to take Abigail’s place and puts her through a long, exhausting set of rehearsals to get her ready for the big opening night, at which he’s invited several Broadway producers (shades of Babes in Arms!) to witness the show and see if any of them want to back it on the Main Stem. Determined to shut down the show, Orville (ya remember Orville?) travels to Broadway to hunt down Abigail and bring her back to take over her part even if that means closing down the performance altogether. It ends pretty much the way you’d expect it too, with Jane and Joe pairing off and Abigail giving up her ambitions to stay in town, marry Orville and run the farm (so Jasper gets his longed-for reunion of the Wingait and Falbury families after all!).

Summer Stock was produced by Joe Pasternack (whose musicals former MGM boss Dore Schary once described as taking place in the “Land of Pasternacky,” with little or no connection to the real world) after MGM’s greatest musical producer, Arthur Freed, pretty much washed his hands of Judy Garland with the fiascoes of The Barkleys of Broadway and Annie Get Your Gun (in which she was replaced by Ginger Rogers and Betty Hutton, respectively). It’s actually a fun little musical if you can enjoy it for what it is and not see it through the lens of what both Judy Garland and Gene Kelly were capable of in more challenging material. Needless to say, Judy was a handful during production; Gene Kelly, who owed a lot to Judy Garland because she had insisted on him as her co-star in his first film, For Me and My Gal (1942), and had even had the writers redo the script so she ended up with Kelly’s character instead of George Murphy’s, complained to Pasternack that she reeked of formaldehyde. Later he discovered that it was actually a related chemical called paraldehyde, which Judy was taking as a drug to combat her alcoholism. She’s also considerably overweight through most of the film, which reminded me of the anecdote about how James Dean was put on a high-calorie diet before shooting East of Eden. When Dean asked why, he was told, “We want to fatten you up so you look like you grew up on a farm.” “But I did grow up on a farm!” Dean said. “Don’t you know how hard farm kids have to work?” When Summer Stock was in rough-cut form, Pasternack had it run for various MGM executives, who were disappointed in it and thought it needed another big production number to feature Judy Garland.

The problem was that Garland had gone off to a sanitarium to rest and recuperate after the strains of making the film, and by the time she re-emerged it was two months later and she was about 20 pounds lighter. Pasternack and the MGM executives licensed the old 1930 song by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, “Get Happy,” and had Judy perform it in the same androgynous costume in which she’d performed the unused song “Mr. Monotony” from Easter Parade with a male chorus line cavorting around her. The result was Judy’s most stunning turn in the film and a number so much better than the rest a lot of people assumed that it was an outtake from a previous Garland MGM film spliced into this one. It wasn’t. In Britain, Summer Stock was retitled If You Feel Like Singing because MGM’s British distributors didn’t think the American slang phrase “summer stock” (meaning a low-budget theatre production put on during the summer while the mainstream theatres were closed) would mean anything to a British audience. Under either title, it’s a quite accomplished feel-good musical even though it suffers from the annoying antics of Eddie Bracken and Phil Silvers, and a decent if not spectacular way for Judy Garland to end her MGM contract career. (Afterwards she was shoehorned in to replace June Allyson in the 1951 film Royal Wedding with Fred Astaire, but she blew off so many rehearsal and costume-fitting appointments that Dore Schary and Arthur Freed reluctantly fired her and Jane Powell took her place.) Judy would, of course, go on to bigger and better things with her new husband, Sid Luft, including the film A Star Is Born (1954) and a career as a major concert attraction, though her mental instability and constant drug use (MGM had got her hooked on prescription pills, not – as is commonly reported – to overwork her, but to keep her weight down to camera-friendly levels) made the rest of her life a troubled one until she died of an overdose in 1969.