George Sidney was a journeyman director but a first-rate craftsman -- his film The Harvey Girls, starring Judy Garland in one of her most enchanting performances, is a classic MGM musical of the second rank . . . which is to say, merely miraculous.
But it has transcendently great moments -- two, in fact -- and they're among the most glorious in all of cinema.
One occurs during the big production number built around the movie's Oscar-winning song, On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, by Johnny Mercer and Harry Warren. It's a complex sequence depicting (and celebrating) the arrival of a train in a small Western town. It has several movements involving scores of dancing and singing extras, a number of featured performers doing small bits of business and eventually Garland at the center of it all.
The second movement starts when Garland appears on the platform of the train, descends and moves into the crowd, joining in the song. In one long, exhilarating shot, lasting more than two minutes, Garland lip syncs her vocal part, engages in various intricate and tightly choreographed evolutions and mini-dances amidst the crowd, followed by a continuously moving camera on a tracked crane.
The choreography was worked out in advance with a Garland dance double. Garland then, according to Sidney, appeared on the set, watched a run-through of the number with the double and said she was ready to shoot. She performed it flawlessly, adding a few touches of her own, in one take -- the take used in the finished film. This doesn't seem possible, but Garland did it. It was George Sidney, of course, who asked her to.
Interestingly, Sidney, towards the end of his career, directed what is probably the best of the Elvis movies, Viva Las Vegas. Elvis's performance of the title song is also done in a single long take, with some moderately complicated choreography involving a gaggle of showgirls, multiple camera moves and constant lighting changes. It wasn't quite on the same level of technical challenge as Garland's feat in The Harvey Girls but it's almost as exciting.
Elsewhere in the film Ann-Margret performs a song in one long shot that involves even more complicated logistics, but it's not a very good song so the virtuosity seems wasted, alas. Still, it's yet another example of the way Sidney got inspired from time to time to try a piece of bravura filmmaking, and of his uncanny ability, given a great performer, to pull it off.
There's another musical number in The Harvey Girls which isn't quite as virtuosic but is in some ways more impressive. Garland, a young Cyd Charisse and Virginia O'Brien sing an oddly melancholy, wistful song, It's A Great Big World, about their hopes and dreams as they're getting ready for bed. Between verses they do some simple, grave dances with each other, dressed in their nightgowns. It's all very quiet, slow, dreamlike, touching -- and vaguely, very vaguely, erotic. It's one of the high points of the MGM musical oeuvre and not quite like any other.
With a few sequences of sublime, breathtaking cinema dotted here and there throughout his work, George Sidney achieved his own modest but undeniable measure of immortality.