WORDS AND MUSIC

I guess it depends upon one's definition of "remembered," and by whom. 

A good couple dozen of their songs have long been considered standards, putting them right alongside those of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern and others of the Tin Pan Alley era.

I'm certainly in some agreement with you about the film and its overwrought melodrama and, I'm sorry to say, the abilities of Tom Drake, a generally colorless actor who never quite seemed able to relax and shed his stiffness before the MGM cameras. And even the astonishingly multi-talented Rooney seemed so determined to wrest an Oscar nomination from the Academy that it's like watching someone trying to choke a confession out of a suspect, squeezing so hard that any truth or life is strangled in the process. I was watching Girl Crazy just last night and there was far more honesty in a simple little scene of him and Garland washing dishes than there was in all of his WAM pathos. He simply tried too hard instead of doing what he knew how to do best.

Still, with all that, I find the film loaded with entertainment value just for the numbers, of which there were about a dozen. Garland's two and the sublime "Slaughter On Tenth Avenue" alone are worth the proverbial price of admission. And as a matter of personal taste, I much prefer the sophisticated wit and deft rhymes of Hart's lyrics to the right-between-your-eyes sentiment of Oscar Hammerstein's. For example:

Summer journeys to Niagara
And all other places aggra-
Vate all our cares
We'll save our fares

Beans could get no keener re-
Ception in a beanery
Bless our mountain greenery
Home

Poor Johnny One-Note
Sang out with gusto
And just o-
Verlorded the place
Poor Johnny One-Note
Yelled willy-nilly
Until he
Was blue in the face
For holding one note was his ace

Clever and brilliant.