Judy Garland gives musical characters a seriousness that makes their unhappiness matter, even amid the make-believe. We value her directness: in The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy's homesickness holds our attention when the comic routines have worn thin.
Fi1m perspective
In The Wizard of Oz (1939), Garland sings Over the Rainbow with a seriousness that makes Dorothy's wish to be elsewhere easy to understand. Harold Arlen's melody gives her room to sound wistful without making that longing seem cute. We were moved by how much she makes the wish matter. Her unaffected performance gives us a reason to care about the child among the elaborate costumes and comic turns.
That directness was worth more than the juvenile parts MGM kept giving her. The early pairings with Mickey Rooney helped establish her, but being repeatedly cast as the plucky innocent limited what the films asked of her. The songs advance the family story in Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), one of her MGM musicals of the 1940s. That is a good fit for an actor who can make singing feel like an ordinary way of saying something important.
Her acting between songs deserves just as much attention. In The Wizard of Oz, she listens to Ray Bolger's Scarecrow and Jack Haley's Tin Man with enough interest to make their friendship credible. Victor Fleming gets more from letting her hold our attention than from adding another elaborate routine, and Blanche Sewell's editing gives the Munchkin sequence more time than it needs. We can admire Garland without forgiving every delay around her; there are stretches when the film would improve simply by getting back to Dorothy.
A Star Is Born (1954) brought her back after she left MGM in the early 1950s, with a part that called on her dramatic acting as well as her singing. Her later supporting role in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) took her into non-musical drama. Neither move should seem surprising after Oz, which already depends on her ability to make fear and homesickness credible. After Dorothy, A Star Is Born is where we would go to see what else she could do.
Biography
Judy Garland was an American actress and singer. Born Frances Ethel Gumm on 10 June 1922 in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, she began performing in vaudeville with her sisters before signing with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
She appeared in more than two dozen films for the studio, including nine with Mickey Rooney. Her best-known roles include Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939), Esther Smith in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Hannah Brown in Easter Parade (1948), Manuela Alva in The Pirate (1948), Vicki Lester in A Star Is Born (1954), and Irene Hoffman Wallner in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). She also voiced Mewsette in Gay Purr-ee (1962) and played Jean Hansen in A Child Is Waiting (1963).
Garland died on 22 June 1969. She received a juvenile Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Grammy Award and a Special Tony Award, and was nominated for Academy Awards for A Star Is Born and Judgment at Nuremberg.
