Updated & Downgraded

When the Boys Meet the Girls was snazzy back in 1943, when young Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney socked it across as a prime-quality MGM musical called Girl Crazy. Mickey was the Eastern playboy packed West to buckle down at Cody College, and Judy made extracurricular magic from such Gershwin standards as Embraceable You, Bidin' My Time, and I Got Rhythm.

In this remake, MGM cooks the goose that laid the golden egg. Rarely have so many charmless performers been assembled. Zing, freshness, warmth, humor and yay-team vitality have been banished--presumably to please a new generation that will never know what it missed. The Garland-Rooney roles are taken over by Singers Connie Francis and Harve Presnell, who mope through the vintage show tunes as though they have memorized the words and music while disowning the message. Instead of getting-the-gang-together-to-put-on-a-dandy-show, they are paying off a gambling debt for Connie's father by running a dude ranch for hot-blooded divorcees awaiting final decrees.

The brains behind The Boys undoubtedly believe that the movie reflects changing tastes, but they seem to confuse updating with downgrading. In front of a camera that sits paralyzed with embarrassment most of the time, Louis Armstrong, Liberace, Herman's Hermits and other specialty acts struggle gamely to stay cool. It is Armstrong's ironic duty to appear at the fadeout, rumbling in song, ". . . who could ask for anything more?"

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