Despite a very faded print - possibly third or fourth generation - the charm and the score came shining through. As most people writing here have noted this is clearly Meet Me In St Louis set twenty-five years earlier but there's no real attempt to hide this; MGM and Fox both invested heavily in musicals especially in the forties and fans of the era would probably cite Alice Faye, Betty Grable, Don Ameche, Carmen Miranda and Cesar Romero as often as they would Judy Garland, Ann Miller, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. This unashamed homage to Meet Me In St. Louis has a lovely score albeit one that used three separate lyricists who collaborated with Jerome Kern on what proved to be his last score (by a somewhat bizarre coincidence George Gershwin, who like Kern began on Broadway, also died after working on a movie). Unlike Meet Me In St Louis, which yielded three 'hit' songs, Centenniel Summer had a much lower profile song-wise albeit discerning artists have kept at least two of the numbers, In Love In Vain and All Through The Day alive via cabaret and recordings. I can only guess how sumptuous it would look in three-stripe technicolor and hope that someone someday will lay a new DVD on us.
Review of Centennial Summer
