I decided to bite the bullet and read this, because I am thoroughly ear-wormed by Judy Garland’s hit from the film-of-the-book, “On the Atcheson, Topeka and the Santa Fe”:
The film is based on a novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams, published a few years earlier in 1942, and like the film set in the 1890s. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
“Your employment card shows experience,” he remarked with an effect of slight incredulity.
I found it terribly charming. The three central characters are young women who go out to Arizona from the Midwest and the East to work in one of the Harvey House chain of restaurants in the fictional town of Sandrock. This was a chain where the waitresses were relentlessly chaperoned and had to sign contracts for six months or a year, basically bargaining away their freedom for a steady income and the chance to meet lots of potential men in a safe environment.
The tone of the book is affectionately satirical. I think if I had been in a more grumpy mood when I read it, I would have found that annoying, but I wasn’t and I didn’t. The girls have to deal with the standard clichés of prospectors, ranchers, sex workers, the evil judge, an English aristocrat who has somehow got lost, and their own upbringings and expectations; one of them has been brought up in an evangelical cult and is Breaking Free.
“I wonder what it would be like to be a carnal snare,” she said to herself, and instantly suppressed the frightening and tempting hypothesis.
It’s a violent book – about a third of the named characters have been killed off by the end, and the threat of coercion lurks ominously in the background. But it’s also a rather cheerful interpretation of the Western legend, by a man but from the women’s point of view. There is a lovely postscript when the survivors get together fifty years later, in the present day (ie the 1940s), making the point to contemporary readers that the Wild West was well within living memory.
Of course the Western genre is thoroughly racist. I think I spotted precisely one black character, and there is a Chinese laundryman in Sandrock (though we are told in the epilogue that his grandchildren have totally assimilated). Native Americans are portrayed only as potential rapists. But it’s also a genre about women’s empowerment, as I have noted before.
The book is available on the Internet Archive, now that that is working again; if you want a hard copy for a huge price you can get it here (please do; I get commission). I had previously come across the author as the writer of the short story that was adapted into the excellent early Oscar winner It Happened One Night, starring Cary Grant and Claudette Colbert, and will keep an eye out for more of his work as it becomes available.
Of course, having read the book I really had to watch the film as well. One thing that struck me immediately is that although the YouTube-friendly cut of “On the Atcheson, Topeka and the Santa Fe” starts with Judy Garland emerging from the train that brings her to Sandrock, in fact there is a whole five minutes of song before that, started off by the one credited black actor in the movie, Ben Carter who plays John Henry, the barman in the Alhambra. (Sadly, he died aged 39 later that year.) Here is the whole thing for your delectation and delight – and it is delightful. Judy Garland did her first two and a half minutes here in a single take.
The girl from the crazy evangelist cult in the book is just another one of the girls in the film (played by Cyd Charisse, in her first speaking role) and that nobody actually dies (unlike in the sanguinary novel). Also Angela Lansbury is the lead among the bad girls across the road (and I think the only one who gets any lines), and Ray Bolger, reunited with Judy Garland from The Wizard of Oz, does a great turn as the blacksmith who doesn’t actually like horses.
Virginia O’Brien got written out during filming because her pregnancy was impossible to conceal (and she gets one of the good songs as well just before she disappears). Of course the whole thing is firmly wedded to the white colonialist narrative of the American West – a little more so than the book if anything. the Native Americans in the film are silent and passive, there is the one black character and no Asians.
But at the same time, at a moment historically when women were being squeezed back out of the American workforce, this is a story about women carving out their own space in American history and fighting back against men who try and put them in their place. The end of the film sees the ‘respectable’ Harvey girls reconcile with the sex workers across the road to defeat male violence and promote true love. There’s a lot going on here.
1946 was a tremendous year in film. I really liked the Oscar winner, The Best Years of Our Lives, but that year also saw It’s A Wonderful Life and The Big Sleep, neither of which I have seen but both of which are generally rated as more memorable. The Harvey Girls was a pleasant winter’s evening diversion, and I recommend it.