CineMatinee- April 2008
Unless otherwise noted, screening time is 1.30 PM, and admission is $4 for everyone except film society members who are admitted for $1. The theatre is located one half block of the Mesilla Plaza. For more information, please call 524-8287 or 522-0286.
April 26- The Harvey Girls (1946, 101 minutes, not rated, partially shot in New Mexico) CineMatinee explores a new genre, the musical!! The story line is fictional, to be sure, but it's based on real-life circumstances. Fred Harvey established a chain of restaurants along the Santa Fe Railroad line in the 1870s. The Harvey Girls who ran the places were more than waitresses; they were civilizing influences on the Old West. The movie relates the experiences of a group of these young women, and one in particular, as they open a new rail-stop eatery in Sandrock, Arizona.
Judy Garland plays Susan Bradley, a small-town girl from Ohio, who is not heading to Sandrock to work in a Harvey House at all but to get married as a mail-order bride. When they arrive and Susan sees whom she's to marry, a grizzled old-timer played by grizzled old actor, Chill Wills, she backs off in a hurry. Now, faced with no means to make her way, she joins the Harvey crew.
The plot is so slight it's in danger every moment of wafting away on the desert breeze. But its enthusiastic cast carries it forward, and many of its musical numbers remain entertaining. Susan no sooner becomes a waitress than she finds out the crooked local judge played by Preston Foster, and the honest local saloonkeeper played by John Hodiak, don't want the Harvey House in town. Being partners in the saloon business, these two fear the restaurant will bring respectability with it and diminish their clientele. The film's conflict comes mainly between the judge and the Harvey establishment, because it is only the judge who will stop at nothing to maintain his own interests.
The words and music to the film's tunes were written by Johnny Mercer and Harry Warren. The show stopper is "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe," but other numbers include "In the Valley," "Wait and See," "The Train Must Be Fed," "Oh, You Kid," "It's a Great Big World," "The Wild, Wild West," and "Swing Your Partner Round and Round."
This film is being shown in conjunction with the Las Cruces Railroad Museum’s weekend-long Railroad Days celebration, which commemorates the arrival of the first train in Las Cruces. Special guests that will appear before the movie include Harvey Girls re-enactors, courtesy of the Railroad and Transportation Museum of El Paso.
