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Beautiful, moving film.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Blistering performances.

"Ah, Wilderness!" should make a great musical--in fact, it made a very good one on Broadway, as "Take Me Along" in 1959--and this Freed Unit special has some greatness in it, which keeps being undercut. It's beautifully cast, the Technicolor is extraordinary, and the director, the always underrated Rouben Mamoulian, shows a lot of feel for the small-town turn-of-the-century setting and the small crises in the Miller family. But it was a troubled production, and it suffered some ruinous cuts. The editing's frankly sloppy, and misguided things happen that you don't expect to happen in MGM musicals. Mickey Rooney (10 years too old for the part, but he hides it well, and not doing those Mickey Rooney overacting things that often annoy me) and Gloria De Haven (lovely, with a lovely voice) dance fetchingly to "Afraid to Be in Love" on an emerald park lawn, and the number just fades out, no payoff, no resolution. Rooney gets drunk with Marilyn Maxwell in a cheap saloon, and there's supposed to be an Omar Khayam dream ballet (there are production stills), but it doesn't happen, and that scene, too, just fades out. The always-exemplary Walter Huston, who's charming here, rolls up the movie with the curtain line, "Well, spring isn't everything, is it, Essie?", and it's supposed to resonate because he was supposed to sing "Spring Isn't Everything," a sweet ballad similar to the "September Song" Huston introduced in "Knickerbocker Holiday," but that, too, has been cut, so it just seems an odd way to fade out. What's left of the Harry Warren-Ralph Blane score isn't great, but it's quite integrated into the action, and well performed. I caught this again on TCM recently and it's better than I remembered, but I keep wanting it to be better still.

"Summer Holiday" is old-fashioned in the worst sense of the phrase. O'Neill's "Ah, Wilderness!!" is bland-ed out by the MGM factory into 'homespun' niceties with no edge and no basis in reality. The acting is exaggerated in the extreme, with everyone overreacting to everyone and indicating their characters with sledgehammer finesse. Rooney, often a very fine performer, is at his overacting worst here, far too old to play a teenager and trying far to hard to be an innocent. It's totally unbelievable. The songs are instantly forgettable and the direction is downright weird at times. There's a reason that this film sat on the studio shelf for two years, flopped upon release and ended Rooney's career at MGM. It's awful.

Musicalization of Ah! Wilderness is okay with Mickey one of the oldest high school graduates you'll ever see. This was a huge flop upon release and coupled with Rooney's next film Words and Music, also a significant money loser, it signaled the end of his reign as a box office champ and a long slide until he reemerged as a character actor in his up and down career.It's the supporting cast of Huston, Morgan, Selena Royale and Marilyn Maxwell that make the picture worth seeing. Agnes Moorehead, who looks great in the period costumes, is wasted in the part of Cousin Lily which has been reduced from the original.Even though it's O'Neill's only comedy the original has touches of drama and pathos all of which have been drained from this. Still a pleasant film with gorgeous color and MGM's accustomed quality production values, the clothes in particular are beautiful, but as musicals go this is minor with no memorable songs nor dances.

Summer Holiday is the forgotten musical version of Eugene O'Neill's Ah Wilderness and deservedly so with the Broadway musical adaptation of Take Me Along. With the exception of the Stanley Steamer song, none of the other Harry Warren-Ralph Blane songs are worth remembering and even that one is questionable. It was right after the release of this film that MGM let Mickey Rooney go and I don't think it was a coincidence. The film was made in 1946 and released in 1948, so Mickey was 26 playing an Andy Hardy like teenager. He was just way too old for the part of the 17 year old who was affecting radical ideas in a spirit of youthful rebellion.Rooney made four films for MGM from 1946 to 1948, this one, Killer McCoy a remake of Robert Taylor's A Crowd Roars, Love Laughs at Andy Hardy and Words and Music. In all of them Rooney was playing an adult part. Even in the Andy Hardy film, Mickey played an adult Andy Hardy returned from World War II. Why he was in this Louis B. Mayer only knows. Rooney's bad casting makes Summer Holiday all the worse because in the original Ah Wilderness the emphasis is on the father's character played here by Walter Huston. And in the Broadway show Take Me Along which won a Tony Award for Jackie Gleason, the Great One played the inebriated brother-in-law Uncle Sid here played by Frank Morgan and that's the central character.Gloria DeHaven steps in for Judy Garland as Rooney's sweet and adorable girl friend and Marilyn Maxwell plays the show girl who gives Rooney an adult education. In the original play O'Neill has her as a prostitute, but this was the Hollywood of the Code so all Marilyn does is get young Rooney soused.A lot of really talented people had a hand in this one and they do their best, but Summer Holiday fades rather quickly into a chilly autumn.