Small Town Girl (1953)

(On Cable TV, January 2021) The best movie musicals of the 1950s manage to combine an interesting premise with great individual set-pieces, and while Small Town Girl isn’t much more than a second-tier MGM musical, you can clearly see how one feeds into the other to create something remarkably entertaining. Of course, I’m twice-biased in saying so: Ann Miller is one of my favourite stars of that period, and the film provides her with both a meaty role as a romantic antagonist and a pair of good dance numbers. Furthermore, I’ve been curious about the “Take Me to Broadway” hopping dance that opens That’s Entertainment II for a while, and this is the film it comes from. The premise is not that bad, especially when measured against so many of the Broadway musicals of the time: Here, a rich young man eloping with his fiancée (Miller) is caught speeding through a small town, and the local judge orders him to remain detained in the town jail for thirty days. Attempts to lighten the sentence are (relatively) successful, and so from his vantage point on the main square, he becomes part of the town’s day-to-day life to the point of falling for the judge’s daughter and having serious second thoughts about his fiancée. (Which is just as well, since she’s a shallow fortune chaser who starts making plans with another man while he’s inside. Just so there’s not discomfort with the plot.)  There are other attractions as well — Bobby Van is magnificent in the exhausting “Street Dance” in which he hops around town, S. Z. Sakall turns in a great supporting role, and an uncredited Busby Berkeley provides choreography. Small Town Girl is not meant to be particularly deep or spectacular—this was clearly a B-grade effort for MGM—but it works more often than not, and offers further proof that in its heyday, the movie musical could be perfectly entertaining even when it wasn’t at its best.