'WHEN THE BOYS MEET THE GIRLS'.....WHEN MGM MUSICALS MEET THEIR DOOM

 When The Boys Meet The Girls (1965)    And the the Bizarro World 1960's films just keep on comin' at us......bless their disastrous little hearts.......

               In the golden age of MGM musicals, the famously gifted, prolific Arthur Freed unit created one classic musical after another.....films like "Singin' In The Rain", "The Band Wagon" and "An American In Paris".

                You only need to look at "When The Boys Meet The Girls" to see how far both the studio and its sporadic attempts at musicals had fallen.  Not all that surprising, considering this film fell into the hands of producer Sam Katzman, a prolific rock-bottom budget shlockmeister. 

                Katzman, to put it mildly, was no Arthur Freed, but we'd give him some credit for the sheer lunacy of this movie......a mad, mad stab at remaking the Mickey Roomey-Judy Garland 1943 "Girl Crazy".

                Even crazier, the movie, like some kind of Frankenstein-ian lab experiment gone awry, made a demented effort to blend the original film's Gershwin tunes with guest appearances from 1965's latest Billboard chart toppers......such as the watered-down Beatles wanna be Herman's Hermits and ephemeral Sam The Sham And The Pharohs.

               But wait! There's more!  For any grandparents who might stumble the theater, they'd feast their tired eyes on the immortal Louis Armstrong, the one and only gay-ahead-of-his time Vegas piano pounder Liberace and Davis and Reese, a bottom of the barrel comedy team. 

               There's no sense in us trying to describe how this eclectic bunch of performers, who look they've all landed from different planets, could possibly fit into one single movie. You'd just have to see it to believe it. 

               If that it isn't enough, there's a boy-meets-girl plot thrown into this overcooked goulash, involving a wealthy playboy (Harve Presnell, a tall, dashing Broadway tenor born 20 years too late for the kind of film musical career he deserved.) The object of his affection is Connie Francis, the diminutive belter already rendered out-of-date by the onslaught of 60's rock 'n roll.

              (See our post on Francis's previous MGM vehicle, '64's "Looking For Love" on 5/28/19)

             The film plays out as a ridiculous vaudeville show but every so often a few highlights stand out like Louis Armstrong's appearance and Presnell's beautifully sung rendition of "Embraceable You". But then again, there's also 1960's comic bimbo Sue Ann Langdon warbling "Treat Me Rough", extolling the joys of physical assault......(remember this came eons before #MeToo)

               Overall embarrassing and instantly forgettable, "When The Boys Meet The Girls" was a 1 star (*) hot mess......

              ........ but let's hear it for Harve Presnell. With movies like this functioning at the last nails in musicals' coffins, Presnell left films to enjoy a long, flourishing career on stage........and in 1996's Coen brothers classic 'Fargo', he came roaring back into movies as a bald, elderly character actor.

                 If only he'd gotten to sing "Embraceable You" before Steve Buscemi shot him.....(and don't miss stopping in to BQ tomorrow, we'll delve into even MORE 1960's pop music madness! ).