Instead of Meet Me in St. Louis’s 1903 Midwest, The Harvey Girls occupies a late nineteenth-century Southwest. This is a western musical, based on the real-life Fred Harvey restaurants that helped tame the territory, and the impact of the recent Broadway sensation Oklahoma! (1943) is evident. You can’t quite describe The Harvey Girls as a [...]

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The Harvey Girls was Garland’s first vehicle in response to Meet Me in St. Louis, a movie hoping to emulate the earlier picture’s scrupulous skill in establishing a sense of place, character, and theme through music. It’s a boisterous, action-packed, picturesque, funny musical, and, though it is uneven, Garland holds it together with her unassailable [...]

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