Despite its appalling opening and ending(no spoilers)this is a splendid early 1950's musical. It is also a strange film in that it appears to uphold what it subverts. It manages to make a small piously religious town into a fantasy land of incredible set pieces, and only occasionally takes us to New York to show off Ann Miller at her very best. Farley Granger speeds too fast through this ' dot ' of a place as he initially calls it and is given 30 days in jail. Here he is well fed and eventually grows to like being behind bars, only escaping to New York once to his fiance Ann Miller before returning to his prison. Crazy ? Of course it all is, and the acting cast make it even crazier when the look of love starts to show in the face of the judge's daughter played beautifully by Jane Powell. The pious town also has the dancer and good actor Bobbie Van in it and the witty dialogue is thrown about like confetti. Add the idiosyncratic S. Z. Sakall and you have a small town that holds the best of Hollywood during that briefly short period, end of the 1940's to almost midway 1950's of delightful, unpretentious musicals. I love the film and if you are depressed by the world outside just sit down and enjoy its fantasy of a life that exists in dreams, and rarely has a place on earth, except in that dream place of once upon a time called the cinema screen. If hard to find hunt for it. And let the pious aspects of the film dissolve into dust and forget that these scenes were not necessary, unless of course you are pious yourself. A 9 for a near masterpiece of escapism.
Review of Small Town Girl
