RIP Betty Garrett

Betty Garrett is not a name likely to loom large in Bar 101 drinking games or Outback quiz nights.  Even if she had made it big in her 40s and 50s hey day it’s unlikely she would anyway, I guess, but it says something about Garrett’s compromised career that we at Auteur House only stock three of her movies, two made before her political blacklist and the other a partial comeback after the McCarthyist hysteria had subsided.

As a movie star Garrett’s finest hour was her supporting part in “On the Town” (1949), the first musical ever shot on location.  Playing a sexually aggressive taxi driver who corners and eventually conquers the then weedy wall flower Frank Sinatra, Garrett is very funny, easily holding her own with the 20th century’s finest voice.  It was Garrett’s second film with Sinatra that year, the first being the relatively minor Busby Berkeley effort “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”.  In between the two she also found time to co-star with swimming beauty Esther Williams in the fun “Neptune’s Daughter”.

Garrett did not make another film for six years.  Married to one-time communist Larry Parks - amongst the highest profile blacklisted stars, best known for impersonating Al Jolson in two successful biopics - Garrett was guilty by association.  Parks’ principled decision not to name names before the House of Un-American Activities Committee had employment consequences.

Ironically, Garrett’s part in her comeback movie is amongst her best.  The closest she ever came to a leading role, she plays an aspiring writer sharing a low rent New York apartment with sibling Janet Leigh in “My Sister Eileen” (1955).  A tuneful, good rather than great musical comedy, Garrett is well paired with the young Jack Lemmon, more than compensating for his thin voice.

Thereafter Garrett worked in television, sometimes on prestigious shows like “All in the Family”.  Happily she was still working at age 90, making her last film, “Dark and Stormy Night”, in 2009.