Trailer
Plot summary
In the 1890s, a crew of Harvey Girls travels by rail to Sandrock, New Mexico, to open a new Harvey House restaurant. Susan Bradley is on the same train, leaving Ohio to marry H. H. Hartsey, a man she knows only from the love letters he sent her in answer to a lonely-hearts advertisement. Hartsey is not what she pictured, and the two agree they are mismatched. He also tells her that Ned Trent, a co-owner of the Alhambra Saloon, wrote those letters as a joke. Susan confronts Ned, who offers to pay her fare back to Ohio. She refuses and vows to drive him and his saloon out of town, then joins the Harvey Girls.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Harvey Girls (1946)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- MGM first conceived The Harvey Girls as a dramatic western vehicle for Lana Turner, but after Roger Edens saw the musical Oklahoma! he had it reworked as a western musical built around Judy Garland, convincing her to pass on Yolanda and the Thief, which her fiancé Vincente Minnelli directed.
- Virginia O'Brien, the comic actress known for deadpan singing, was pregnant while The Harvey Girls was filmed, so several planned scenes with Ray Bolger were never shot because hiding her pregnancy proved too difficult; that is why her character vanishes after she sings "Wild Wild West".
- MGM gave "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe" to record companies before shooting had finished, and it became a hit that dominated the airwaves through 1945; Johnny Mercer and the Pied Pipers' version spent seven straight weeks at No. 1 on Billboard.
- Judy Garland reportedly shot the entire song "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe" up to the tempo change in one take, twice, after watching her stand-in do a single run-through.
- Angela Lansbury, a soprano, had her songs as the saloon girl Em dubbed by singer Virginia Reess because MGM wanted a deeper, huskier voice; she sang in her own voice in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Till the Clouds Roll By.
- Three other Warren and Mercer songs written for The Harvey Girls were cut: "March of the Doagies", "Hayride" and "My Intuition". The "Doagies" production number for Judy Garland survived as an outtake used in That's Entertainment! III in 1994.
