For Me and My Gal (1942) on Netflix
NR19421h 44m
Jo Hayden and Harry Palmer are vaudeville performers aiming for the Palace Theatre on Broadway. When Harry's draft notice arrives, he injures his hand to put off reporting.
- Netflix4.3/5
- IMDb7.0/104,185 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
In the heyday of vaudeville, with America close to entering World War I, Jo Hayden and Harry Palmer are two performers with the same ambition: a booking at the Palace Theatre on Broadway, the height of a vaudeville career, and a wedding right afterward. They join forces as an act. Weeks before that plan can come off, a draft notice reaches Harry. Wanting a short delay before he reports for duty, he deliberately crushes his hand in a trunk. On that same day Jo learns that her brother, who was training to be a doctor, has been killed in the war.
Cast
- Ernie Alexanderas Theater Workman with Big Die
- John Breenas Soldier
Show all 20 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about For Me and My Gal (1942)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
Audiences at the first preview of For Me and My Gal wanted Jo (Judy Garland) to end up with Jimmy (George Murphy) instead of Harry (Gene Kelly), so MGM's Louis B. Mayer ordered three weeks of extra shooting to give Kelly's character a conscience and cut Murphy's screen time.- Judy Garland's acting coach Stella Adler, then an advisor to MGM, told producer Arthur Freed to merge the script's two female leads into a single role for Garland, and she also suggested Gene Kelly for the male lead.
- Gene Kelly got the lead after David O. Selznick handed his contract over to Arthur Freed, over the objections of Freed's bosses at MGM; George Murphy, cast as Harry Palmer, was switched to playing Jimmy Metcalf.
- For Me and My Gal gave nineteen-year-old Judy Garland her first real "adult" role, after years of playing juvenile parts, many of them opposite Mickey Rooney.
- Judy Garland, who disliked director Busby Berkeley, coached Gene Kelly on adapting his stage acting for films during the shoot and backed him in his arguments with Berkeley.
- The film was the American movie debut of Hungarian singer Martha Eggerth, who had made over thirty films in Germany, yet she appeared in only two other American films.
