Babes In Arms was Arthur Freed's first solo effort as a producer. He'd worked as an unbilled assistant producer on The Wizard Of Oz, and even though that film hadn't been a smash hit on its initial release, Louis B. Mayer had great faith in Freed's judgment. Freed was one of Mayer's few genuine friends at MGM, with a standing invitation to breakfast at Mayer's home. When Freed told Mayer he wanted to make a film showcasing Judy Garland in a more conventional musical than The Wizard, Mayer gave him his head.
Babes had a relatively low budget but earned a fortune -- it was far more profitable for MGM in the short term than The Wizard had been. Babes was based on a Broadway musical with songs by Rogers and Hart, but Freed dropped several of the numbers from the stage production and added new ones by other composers. He also radically reworked the plot. The changes he made offer a clue to Freed's vision for the Hollywood musical at the very start of his producing career.
The Broadway show concerned a bunch of kids, the sons and daughters of old vaudevillians, who decide to put on a show to help out their parents, who are going through some hard times. The parents don't appear in the stage version, but they are prominent in the film -- featured in a long prologue in which we watch the decline of vaudeville in the early decades of the 20th Century and its virtual demise with the advent of talking pictures.
Freed, a very successful songwriter, had cut his teeth in the vaudeville era, working for a time as an accompanist in the Catskills, and obviously loved the vaudeville traditions very deeply. In Babes, the story of a new generation of performers who revive their parents' Golden Age, he clearly saw a metaphor for what he wanted to do at MGM -- keep those old traditions alive in a contemporary medium. Almost all of his films are imbued with a nostalgia for the theater of his youth, for a magic which he could not believe was really past and gone.
Babes contains loving recreations of routines from the old minstrel tradition, enacted by teenagers, which are saved from bad taste by the affection the filmmakers and performers obviously feel for the pure theatrical genius of the form. In Strike Up the Band, Freed's follow-up to Babes, also starring Garland and Mickey Rooney, there's a good-natured send-up of Victorian melodrama.
Love of theatrical tradition, and a determination to honor it, are key emotional components of these films. But there's also a canny sense that the tradition had to be revivified, translated into dazzling cinematic terms. Freed hired Busby Berkeley to direct the Garland-Rooney musicals. Berkeley was a Broadway choreographer before he came to movies, but he was also a cinematic visionary, who expanded the stage aesthetic into realms that only the camera could explore. Long takes recording complex choreography, swooping crane shots, stage sets that opened up to fantastic proportions were central elements of his style.
A short time later, Freed brought Vincente Minnelli to MGM and championed his career as a movie director. Minnelli had also started out on Broadway, as a director, and like Berkeley had a vision of presenting stage spectacle on film in intrinsically cinematic terms. Minnelli had a more elegant touch than Berkeley, and also got along better with Judy Garland -- so much so that the two eventually got married -- and he became Freed's preferred director for musicals.
Still, as early as Babes In Arms, Freed's emotional and aesthetic ambitions are clear. Like Orson Welles, Freed transformed a profound love of theater into radical cinematic experiments that would convey theatrical effects in the language of movies, that would make old theatrical forms live again on the screen. It was a paradoxical ambition, but it paid off -- it led both men to expand the boundaries of cinematic expression in unique and thrilling ways.