Fresh and Exciting

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Blistering performances.

Though she didn't and couldn't have known it, I Could Go On Singing became Judy Garland's farewell to the big screen. In this role she's perfectly cast in a role that bears a lot of resemblance to the real Judy Garland, a famous singer with problems of custody who wants the son she gave up for adoption years ago. Some twenty years before young medical student Dirk Bogarde, studying in America fell in love with singer Judy Garland just starting her career. That career is something she wanted more than him. But one thing couldn't be changed and that was the boy child Bogarde left with her. Bogarde marries a girl from Great Britain and later on Judy who can't manage a baby and a career gives him up to Bogarde who adopts his own son with his wife and raises him. Now his wife is dead and Judy's back to lay a claim on her son played by Gregory Phillips.Of course Bogarde has never told his son about his origin and therein lies the story. It's the kind of tale we've seen in hundreds of films and radio and television soap operas.But of course what makes I Could Go On Singing special is the singing of Judy Garland. Giving this film which title could serve as her epitaph is Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg who wrote the title song and who wrote her famous Over The Rainbow.Judy also sings By Myself which was sung and danced to by Fred Astaire in The Bandwagon. But a song I'm really glad she did was the Kurt Weill-Maxwell Anderson song It Never Was You. That song comes from the score of Knickerbocker Holiday and it didn't make the screen version. I'm glad that Judy Garland used it in this film, giving it the classiest interpretation possible. A passable enough drama, but great singing and the best epitaph possible for a career which was one of the brightest.

I had never seen this film until tonight (Feb 2008) and have never been a Judy Garland 'fan', even though I am aware of her life and genuinely admire and champion films like THE PIRATE and A STAR IS BORN; so it came as quite a surprise to me to see this 1962 Brit production in Cinemascope get quite bad reviews and be regarded as 'not a success'. In fact the Variety review of the time is particularly mean spirited. I thought Garland was excellent and natural, the production values while a bit cheap offer great stage scenes and Dirk Bogarde plays a believable past lover. It is rare to see adult Garland play opposite a teenage boy as she does in this strong film and those scenes are particularly moving. I COULD GO ON SINGING is a very satisfying film, and the British setting, the Palladium scenes and the teen drama well achieved and resolved. It is very disappointing to see the bad reviews or the carping when this film is clearly well intentioned, particularly to Garland's career in 1962. No wonder it was her last film, she probable felt kicked in the teeth again like in 1954 after A STAR IS BORN. As a 'formal drama' in a British style, it fits and succeeds. I guess if you also like STAR! and the theatrical movies of this type you will admire this film, as I do. In 2008 this film is quite a time capsule of era production and Garland, and for that we should be grateful.

Judy Garland is magnificent playing herself; sorry, playing Jenny Bowman, an American singer of a certain age, in London for a series of concerts at the Palladium. The movie is a mostly mediocre tale of mother love but as a showcase for Garland, both as actress and as a performer, (her scenes at the Palladium were probably as close as the movies ever came to capturing her on-stage persona), is it exhilarating and indelibly moving. By the time she gets around to her drunken 'I can't be spread so thin' speech all traces of the character have been wiped clean and it's Garland, raw and emotional, up there on the screen. She was never to make another film, which is probably just as well. With this you can say she went out on a high.Co-star Dirk Bogarde fights a losing battle, (and he gets some terrible lines to say). He's a prissy, fussy stuffed shirt and you can never believe that he and Garland could ever have been romantically involved. There is also a wonderful turn from that great and perpetually undervalued actress Aline MacMahon as Garland's dresser-cum-secretary-cum-companion. But it's Garland's show. The panavision frame can hardly contain her.

To be honest, I am not REALLY a Judy Garland fanatic, even though I ought to be. I found her TV show extremely entertaining when I saw them on DVD, and, well, how can one NOT be entertained by the Wizard Of Oz? And I've seen snippets of her here and there. I begin this review of 'I Could Go On Singing' saying this and defending my uh, un-Judy Garland obsessiveness, and then say that I found this movie incredibly entertaining! It's as if they got her to play herself during the last portion of her life, what, being a total singing diva, and let the audience go home happy. In this movie, she plays a famous singer who meets up with an old flame (played low-key to the hilt by Dirk Bogarde) to try to meet up with her son who she abandoned long ago, soon after meeting, she wants to keep him! But Bogarde says no! Oh no! What is she to do? Yes, that's pretty much the plot. But who cares when you get to see La Judy in action, singing, bitching and chewing everyone up and spitting everyone out? This is nothing but fun, and well, not Kramer Vs. Kramer. I really would recommend this to anyone, because this could entertain anyone, Judy fan or not (I tell you I'm not!!!!)