The Harvey Girls

Susan Bradley travels west to a town called Sandrock to marry a man she has been writing to. When she arrives she learns her fiancé did not write the letters. Instead of going back she joins the women the train has brought: the Harvey Girls, waitresses in the restaurants opening along the railway. The town's saloon does not want the new restaurant or the order it brings. George Sidney directs. Judy Garland plays Susan, Angela Lansbury plays the saloon singer Em, John Hodiak plays Ned. It is MGM, in Technicolor. The background is real. The restaurant chain Fred Harvey built along the Santa Fe railway at the end of the nineteenth century is regarded as America's first large restaurant chain, and the young women sent from east to west to staff it were known as Harvey Girls. The role of female labour in the settlement of the west is read through that structure. The best known number is On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe. It won the Oscar for best song, and the sequence staged at the railway station is among the most cited in MGM's musicals. The narrative converts a western template into a musical: the town, the saloon, good women and bad women. That binary is the film's weakest feature now. Who it is for: viewers who like classic MGM musicals and Judy Garland. Who it is not for: the story is thin, the conflict is artificial, and the opposition between the women is stereotyped.