It's interesting to speculate what Three Little Girls in Blue might have been like if the film were directed by John Brahm, who originally started to direct before being replaced by the workmanlike Humberstone. Brahm, director of Hangover Square (1945) and The Locket (1946) might have brought some artistic cynicism to this story of three farm girls who use their small inheritance to go to Atlantic City in 1902 to find wealthy husbands. The women --June Haver, Vivian Blaine, Vera Ellen --are all rather charming, but unfortunately none of them apparently could sing, since all three were dubbed, as were the men: George Montgomery, Frank Lattimore, Charles Smith. Celeste Holm does come in during the final third of the film to sing "Always a Lady;" it was her first film after appearing in "Oklahoma" on Broadway.
The real star of the film is the score by Mack Gordon (who also produced the film) and Josef Myrow, including "You Make Me Feel So Young," to which Vera Ellen danced (choreography by Seymour Felix; Vera Ellen was the only dancer in the film) to a fantasy dream filled with Freudian symbolism. The film is in beautiful technicolor with an intense palette emphasizing yellow, blue (appropriately) and red.
One of the reasons that that the Rogers/Astaire films are such successful films is not due to the directors (although Mark Sandrich directed the best ones) but because they have beautiful choreography by Astaire and Hermes Pan and scores by Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, etc., with Astaire and Rogers doing their own singing, emphasizing and illustrating their relationship. In my ballet class dressing room one evening a fellow student and aspiring performer said that he has to be able to dance, sing and act in order to get the best parts; in too many movie musicals, even during the classical period, one or more of these skills is missing.
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