Summer Holiday (1948)

(On Cable TV, July 2021) By the late 1940s, producer Arthur Freed has cemented his reputation as MGM’s foremost musicals producer — the leader of prestige projects for the studio, often working in colour at a time where it was uncommon. You can see some of the cockiness that comes with that status in segments of Summer Holiday, which doesn’t always neatly segregate between spoken and sung moments in the action, and clearly has the means with which to execute its ambitions. Sadly, those ambitions are pedestrian — the film covers a summer in the life of a high-school graduate, but seems intent on presenting an archetypical and rather boring vision of the American heartland. Anything interesting has to be filed off along the way — for instance, our protagonist (MGM golden boy Mickey Rooney) begins the film with an endearing cynical outlook on life that extends to questioning American values and promoting Marxism. See, that’s an interesting character. Obviously, though, this kind of thing can’t stand: before the end of Summer Holiday, he’s reformed into a capitalistic American patriot intent on marrying “the right kind of girl” (don’t worry, he already knows her) after a boozy flirtation with the wild side portrayed as a nightmare. But so was the dint of the land at the time — MGM couldn’t possibly get its teenage hero spouting off anti-establishment rhetoric and make it to the end of the film. This sour note is not exactly counterbalanced by anything else in the film — the surprisingly dull colour cinematography doesn’t help, the blurring of musical numbers with straight dialogue holds back the film from traditional musical numbers and there isn’t much worth remembering from the result. I’ve been watching much of Freed’s filmography lately, and Summer Holiday is certainly lower-tier material — it hasn’t aged all that well and feels too ordinary to be interesting.