Summer Holiday

Summer Holiday (1948)

M-G-M's Great American Musical!

Danville, Connecticut at the turn of the century. Young Richard Miller lives in a middle-class neighborhood with his family. He is in love with the girl next-door, Muriel, but her father isn't too happy with their puppy-love, since Richard always share his revolutionary ideas with her.

Date of release
1948-04-15
TMDB
5.2 / 10 (10)
Runtime
1h 33m
Genres
Music
Director
Rouben Mamoulian

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: $1.6M
  • Budget: $2.2M
  • Earned 0.7× its budget

Summer Holiday is a 1948 American musical-comedy film directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Mickey Rooney and Gloria DeHaven. The picture is based on the play Ah, Wilderness! (1933) by Eugene O'Neill, which had been filmed under that name by MGM in 1935 with Rooney in a much smaller role as the younger brother. Although completed in October 1946, the film sat on the shelf until 1948.

Production

Building on his experience of integrating book and music for the original Broadway production of Oklahoma!, director Rouben Mamoulian saw this project as an opportunity to create a different kind of film musical than the studio had tried before, and he gave the songwriting team of Ralph Blane (lyrics) and Harry Warren (music) specific instructions on what he wanted to achieve.

The result can be seen in the opening sequence "Our Home Town", begun by Nat Miller, who introduces us to the town and to the family. The sequence segues back and forth and back again into lines that are sung, lines that are spoken in rhyme, and lines that are read straight, ending at the soda fountain. The length of this sequence may be the root of the incorrect idea that the whole film is written in rhyme.

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

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