Miss Show Business

By the time Presenting Lily Mars was filmed in 1943, the twenty-year-old Judy Garland had already mastered the clowning, fumbling earnestness in her character’s single-minded pursuit of stardom and, for the first time on film, was displaying some of the world-weary show-biz brass that would point the way to her concert triumphs in middle age — that voice like a Big Band trumpet with a mute on it, moaning low or careening into the stratosphere. Chronologically, the Andy Hardy bloom was just barely off her, but she had come into her own mature talent, inexorably and rapidly. She had made an excellent picture the year before (For Me and My Gal, with Judy and Gene Kelly doing their “Ballin’ the Jack” routine) and had even separated from her first husband by then (having had an affair with Johnny Mercer in the interim). The character Garland plays in Lily Mars is a typical Booth Tarkington teenager, a homely duckling with a pie-in-the-sky dream and the gumption to chase it no matter how many obstacles she smacks into. There’s a lot of Alice Adams in Lily, but it isn’t high society Lily craves — it’s the energy that stage performers lap up from audiences (Garland took that energy and apotheosized it in 1961 at her famed Carnegie Hall concert).

A star is born. Judy Garland, Faye Bainter

I’ve always thought that Garland’s core was comedic rather than dramatic, despite her intelligence and honesty in serious roles like Esther, in A Star Is Born (1954). Garland was always at her loopiest and least self-conscious in movie comedy (she said that she learned how to put a song across from Sophie Tucker). She would have made a dazzling farceur in screwballs, with her verbal and physical gag skills and her short stature and elongated limbs (she looks like a Tex Avery drawing from his 1941 classic “Hollywood Steps Out”), but the genre had all but died out by the early 1940s. Joe Pasternak and Norman Taurog, who made Lily Mars, should have done so much more with her comedy savvy here, but they didn’t have the burn and drive that her better directors often did (Vincente Minnelli, George Cukor, or Busby Berkeley). Pasternak and Taurog misinterpreted her appeal and kept her suspended in the bland Jell-O of wholesome “family” entertainment. Instead of giving her energetic modern numbers to sing, the Pasternak machine saddles her and her irrepressible quiver with mopey love ballads. It’s a huge relief when the movie finale moves from a starchy “Where There’s Music” into “Broadway Rhythm,” but songs like “Every Little Movement Has a Meaning All Its Own” or “When I Look at You” don’t exactly help build the Garland legend. Lily is supposed to be the antithesis of the starched-collar “perfection” of Marta Eggerth (whose operetta swill makes your head drop), much the way Garland herself was the swinging antithesis of the ridiculously popular Deanna Durbin at MGM. 

Despite the family-market machinery and misconceptions, Garland swings through and maps out a route forward for her career in Lily Mars, even if she wasn’t fully aware of it at the time. Her triumph in Lily Mars was a blueprint for Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl (1968), which re-created several gags from it in the “Lovely Bride” and roller-skating numbers. By 1943, Garland, who would make Meet Me in St. Louis the following year and dispense with the last of her childhood pudge, was paving her own yellow brick road.