In the Good Old Summertime Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		5.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

In the Good Old Summertime Blu-ray Movie Review

The second-hand shop around the corrner.

Reviewed by Randy Miller III September 5, 2021

A fluffy musical remake of Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 holiday gem The Shop Around the Corner (which was also remade in 1998 as You've Got Mail), Robert Leonard's In the Good Old Summertime transplants the tale from 1930s Budapest to turn-of-the-century Chicago, where hopeful Veronica Fisher (Judy Garland) wanders into Oberkugen's Music Company looking for a job... much to the dismay of top salesman Andrew Larkin (Van Johnson, The Caine Mutiny), who's already on her bad side and almost never recovers. Once he realizes they're actually secret pen pals, the shop rivalry gets a lot more interesting. With a supporting cast including Buster Keaton (who also choreographed a few scenes), S. Z. Sakall (Casablanca), and Spring Byington (You Can't Take It With You), it's redundant but still worth watching.

While a few obvious changes abound, the bulk of In the Good Old Summertime should feel instantly familiar to fans of The Shop Around the Corner. It's main arc is roughly identical: two turbulent but ultimately star-crossed lovers bide their time at a retail store while Christmas slowly approaches, but a misunderstanding temporarily sends the senior salesman packing before everything gets cleared up. In The Shop Around the Corner, the catalyst was a dark subplot about shop manager Hugo Matuschek's unfaithful wife that drove him to an attempted suicide; this time around, it's the destruction of a Stradivarius violin owned by shop manager Otto Oberkugen (Sakall), who is not married but instead shares a sweet relationship with store employee Nellie Burke (Byington), a character not part of the earlier film. Also new to the cast is actor and accomplished violinist Marcia Van Dyke as Louise Parkson, a major part of the Stradivarius subplot who, smitten with Andrew, turns the otherwise linear love story into an unformed triangle. But while this cast addition might be the story's only backwards step, many of its changes are either slightly for the better or at least pleasingly different enough not to be a problem. After all, why remake a film the exact same way?

Fundamentally, though, In the Good Old Summertime feels like a mild to moderate downgrade across the board: The Shop Around the Corner simply has a better cast from top to bottom where its proportionate characters are concerned. Even its closest matchups only exist because most of the newer cast is just building on all the great work put in nine years earlier. Elsewhere, its pacing isn't quite as tight, and the conclusion doesn't hit with the same impact because its two leads don't have the same spark as Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewart. But while we're talking fundamentals, I'll admit one thing: More so than most musicals, In the Good Old Summertime does a pretty good job integrating them into the show, offering no moments where characters spontaneously erupt into song in a colorful burst of escapism. Here, it often happens because... well, our star-crossed lovers and their co-workers actually work in a music shop, with in-store demos and other such occasions offering a logical backdrop for several catchy musical numbers. Perhaps the only exception is late in the film, when a particularly fancy party paves the way for back-to-back musical numbers by Garland that, while heartfelt and enthusiastic, could've easily been dropped with no loss to the story's flow.

It all adds up to a perfectly watchable but inferior production that, for whatever reason, arrived in theaters less than a decade after the original. Nonetheless, it proved very popular with audiences and still plays well enough today and, if nothing else, stands as an interesting alternate-universe version that's still worth a spin during the Christmas season. True to form, Warner Archive (who finally released The Shop Around the Corner on Blu-ray less than a year ago) serves up another solid disc with good-to-great A/V specs and a few period-specific extras that fans will enjoy.

In the Good Old Summertime Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

OK, it's in glorious Technicolor -- that's one fundamental upgrade of this remake, which sports an unsurprisingly great 1080p transfer sourced from a very recent scan of original source elements. Aside from a few establishing shots that might have been stock footage, the filmic appearance and overall stability of this image is up to par with the boutique label's very best discs. Textures and overall fine detail are first-rate, especially where the period-specific costumes and background details are concerned, which include colorfully decorated shop interiors (when Christmas arrives, at least), and sunny exteriors such as the bookending picnic-style sequences and a handful of other outside-the-shop exchanges. The ornate Christmas party near the film's climax looks extremely impressive too, with its festive decorations and spiffy outfits across the board. Film grain is very well-defined and no glaring distractions could be seen from start to finish, including excessive noise reduction, banding, and compression artifacts, thanks in part to its generous dual-layered encoding and high bit rate. Overall, it's a perfectly clean and crisp presentation that easily stands tall alongside the studio's other sterling catalog releases, and one that die-hard purists should know what to expect out of.

In the Good Old Summertime Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Sadly, the audio falls short in comparison, even accounting for its modest one-channel roots that try to wring sonic detail out of the catchy musical numbers and great dialogue. Much of it sounds slightly muffled with a very slight but pervasively gauzy distortion, which isn't helped due to portions of speech being somewhat buried in the mix -- I had to dial up my receiver a good 10dB to approach intelligible listening levels, and even then often had to make use of the optional English (SDH) subtitles to decipher a few stray lines. While this is by no means a defective presentation (or even unsatisfactory under the circumstances), we've been spoiled by so many crystal-clear Warner Archive discs that a rare exception can't help but disappoint. Another factor? Well, this is a musical... and while its sporadic song-and-dance numbers don't seem to suffer the same fate, this also makes any discrepancies a little more obvious.

In the Good Old Summertime Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This one-disc release ships in a standard keepcase with original poster-themed cover artwork (deceptive as it is) and no inserts of any kind. Most of its bonus features seem to be carried over from Warner Bros.' 2004 DVD, a serviceable but now-dated disc that, like The Shop Around the Corner, sat snugly inside a snapper case.

• Introduction by Judy Garland Biographer John Fricke (4:20) - This short intro offers a quick overview of the film's adaptation from the 1936 Hungarian stage play Parfumerie and 1940's The Shop Around the Corner, as well as trivia about the casting of several supporting roles including Buster Keaton and the screen debut of Liza Minnelli in the final scene.

• James Fitzpatrick MGM Traveltalks - This short pair of vintage scenic documentaries both pay tribute to Chicago, where In the Good Old Summertime takes place, and captures several notable landmarks that make this a pretty neat time capsule. Although it hasn't been restored visually, like the other extras it's at least been given a courtesy bump to lossless audio..

• "Chicago, the Beautiful" (10:15)


• Night Life in Chicago (8:53)

• Theatrical Trailer (3:04) - This enjoyable, fourth wall-breaking promotional piece can also be seen here.

• Song Selection - Instant access to all of the film's seven main song breaks including "In the Good Old Summertime", "Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland", "Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey", "Wait 'Till the Sun Shines, Nellie", "Play That Barbershop Chord", "I Don't Care", and of course "Merry Christmas".

In the Good Old Summertime Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Although it can't help but pale in comparison to Ernst Lubitsch's holiday classic The Shop Around the Corner, Robert Leonard's musical remake In the Good Old Summertime nonetheless serves up a capable Technicolor retelling of a great story that should please fans of its cast including Judy Garland, Buster Keaton, S. Z. Sakall, and Spring Byington. It holds up well enough and is well worth a spin, either in the summer season or right around Christmas. Warner Archive's solid Blu-ray presentation proves to be a nice keepsake -- only a few odd audio volume and clarity issues keep it from feeling like a truly definitive release. Recommended to established fans and newcomers alike.