In 1956, MGM released a film called Meet Me in Las Vegas starring Cyd Charisse and Dan Dailey. It was not the worst musical MGM ever made and I'd be very surprised if anyone thought it was among the best. But it made a few bucks and got one Oscar nomination. My parents took me with them to a movie theater to see it, though the original release date (when I would have been four) seems like too early to me, and I suspect what we went to was a reissue a few years later. Whenever it was, I didn't enjoy it that much. Maybe I'd like it better today (we'll find out soon) but I recall breaking the indoor fidgeting record when my folks and I attended.
Why we went: Because our neighbor was in it. From about the age of 1 until the age of 24, I lived in a home next door to a wonderful actress named Betty Lynn. Betty is now best remembered for playing Thelma Lou, lady friend of Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show, but she had a long career in film and TV apart from that, including several television series. To us, she was more than a neighbor. She was an unofficial aunt.
Betty had a very small part in Meet Me in Las Vegas but when she signed on, it was a pretty large part and it included an elaborate dance number with a dancer then named George Kerris. A few years later, Mr. Kerris — now calling himself George Chakiris — would become a big star with his role in West Side Story and would win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. He and Betty put in six weeks just rehearsing their dance number, which was very physical and called for Betty to be thrown repeatedly onto and against a table. She sustained so many bruises during the rehearsal that the studio doctor ordered them to stop rehearsing that part. She also spent many weeks filming non-dancing scenes.
A few weeks before the film's release, she received a phone call from its producer, Joe Pasternak. As Betty recalls the conversation, he explained that the studio has insisted on the film having a lot of cameos by name stars like Debbie Reynolds and Frank Sinatra. Adding all of those in had meant that something had to go…so about 90% of Betty's scenes were eliminated, including the entire musical number. Betty was professional about it but, of course, not very happy. Well, she's happy now.
This afternoon, my pal Vince Waldron wrote to tell me that the Warner Archive project has released Meet Me in Las Vegas on DVD. Usually, Warner Archives releases plain vanilla DVDs with no special features but in this case, they're including two deleted musical numbers — one with Lena Horne, and the other is the dance sequence with Betty Lynn and George Kerris. I'm going to order two copies — one for me and one for Betty — and I just phoned to tell her about it. Like I said, she's happy now. "You know, I've never even seen that number," she said.
I remember her telling me about it when I was ten or so. She wasn't sure a copy of it even existed and she certainly didn't expect it would ever see the light of a movie projector. I'll let you know what she says about it when she gets a copy. If you'd like to get one, order here. I don't make a commission on these and I'm certainly not recommending the film or predicting you'll like it…but if you want one, there it is.