For Me and My Gal

For Me and My Gal (1942)

She's a Yankee Doodle Girlie!

Two vaudeville performers fall in love, but find their relationship tested by the arrival of WWI.

Date of release
1942-10-21
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (54)
Runtime
1h 44m
Genres
Romance, War
Director
Busby Berkeley

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 1

For Me and My Gal is a 1942 American musical film directed by Busby Berkeley, and starring Judy Garland, George Murphy, Martha Eggerth, Ben Blue and Gene Kelly in his film debut. The film was written by Richard Sherman, Fred F. Finklehoffe and Sid Silvers, based on a story by Howard Emmett Rogers inspired by a true story about vaudeville actors Harry Palmer and Jo Hayden, when Palmer was drafted into World War I. The film was a production of the Arthur Freed unit at MGM.

Production

For Me and My Gal marked the first real "adult" role for the nineteen-year-old Judy Garland, who had played juvenile parts until then, many of them opposite Mickey Rooney. The original script had called for Harry Palmer to be involved with two women, a singer, which was to be Garland's role, and a dancer, who would have most of the dramatic scenes, but Garland's acting coach Stella Adler, who was an advisor to MGM at the time, suggested to produc…

Kelly was 29 years old at the time, and had made a mark on Broadway as the star of Pal Joey and the choreographer of Best Foot Forward. When David O. Selznick signed him to a film contract, Kelly's intention was to return to Broadway after fulfilling his contractual obligation, but he ended up staying in Hollywood for a year because Selznick didn't have a role for him.

Gene Kelly and Judy Garland got along well – she had been in favor of his getting the part, and during shooting she helped Kelly adjust his stage acting for films, and backed him in disagreements with director Busby Berkeley, whom she did not like. Kelly and Garland went on to star together in two other films, The Pirate (1948) and Summer Stock (1950).

The film was also the American motion picture debut of Hungarian singer Martha Eggerth, who had appeared in over thirty films in Germany. Her career in Hollywood did not last long: she appeared in only two other American films.

For Me and My Gal had an estimated budget of $803,000, and was in production at MGM's Culver City studios from 3 April until 23 May 1942, with additional scenes shot in June. Working titles for the film while it was in production were "Me and My Gal" and "The Big Time".

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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