User Reviews

About 30 miles upstream from Manhattan along the Hudson River is High Tor State Park. This is along a wide stretch of the Hudson known as the Tappan Zee. Playwright and writer Maxwell Anderson lived in Rockland County on the West bank of the Hudson. In 1936, he wrote a play called "High Tor." It was named for a summit that overlooks the Hudson south of Haverstraw. A short distance to the south and across the river is Sing Sing prison. And a large quarry remains there today. The dialog of the play includes these descriptions of the location.

A tor is a rocky peak, and the term "high tor" seems redundant. But, there it is on maps of New York state. "High Tor" was a comedy that enjoyed a successful run on Broadway in 1936-37. Then, nearly 20 years later, Anderson wrote it as a musical. It was made as a TV movie – filmed in advance and aired on TV, for the Ford Jubilee series that was broadcast on CBS.

The film quality is not very good, but the sets appear to be well done. The play is a combination comedy, romance, musical and fantasy. It has parts from or resembles other stories, most notably Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The fairy tale romance aspects struck me as similar to "Brigadoon," but set in New York.

The cast all are very good. Bing Crosby is Van Van Dorn and Nancy Olson plays his girlfriend, Judith. Hans Conried and Lloyd Corrigan are two villains of sorts, Biggs and Skimmerhorn. Everett Sloane is superb as DeWitt, the main character of Henry Hudson's crew left ashore to watch for a missing ship 300 years before. Sloane does very well singing "When You're in Love." Other minor characters are good. But this was the first time that most Americans would see Julie Andrews, the young English singer-actress who was about to burst into stardom on Broadway and in cinema.

Bing Crosby was still riding the crest of his popularity at the time (at age 54), and Julie Andrews was making her American film and TV debut. Andrews had been on stage in England since age 12, starting with her mother and stepfather. At 13, she was the youngest person ever to solo in the Royal Command Variety Performance – singing then before King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at the London Palladium (Danny Kaye was among the other performers). In her late teens she was starring in stage plays.

Andrews had made her American stage debut at age 19 in 1954. On Sept. 30, the eve of her birthday, she opened the Broadway production of her successful London musical, "The Boy Friend." After rave reviews she got the part of Eliza Doolittle in "My Fair Lady." It played off Broadway for more than a month before opening March 15, 1956, on Broadway. In the meantime, Andrews also got the part of Lise in "High Tor," which was to be the first made for TV movie. It aired just five days before the opening of "My Fair Lady." And the rest is history.

For Julie Andrews fans, this is a fine film to show her early singing. She had remarkable range – four soprano octaves and even a fifth at one time. The story otherwise is good. Van Dorn is a guy who just wants to live the easy life, away from the hustle and bustle and drudgery of everyday work. Ah, how many of us wouldn't have liked a life like that. But the minute other people enter the picture, we can no longer stay in our self-centered seclusion. The plot has several twists that add to the mix – bank robbers trying to hide out on the tor, the two shysters who are trying to acquire Van Dorn's land – dishonestly, and the romance across spans of time.

None of the tunes made hits of the day, but a couple are very good and catchy. The recordings from the film were issued on an LP record under the Decca label. My DVD of the TV airing included a promo for the record at the end.

Here are a couple sample lines from the film. For more comedy dialog see the Quotes section here on the film's IMDb Web page.

Van Van Dorn, "There's something my pappy used to say… There's nothing man builds but that in the end makes good ruins."

Patsy (played by James Gavin), "We've had a robbery and here's the money. Gotta explain it somehow." Biggs, "I'd rather be under arrest than try to explain it." Patsy, "Judge?" Skimmerhorn, "I'm gonna know everybody in that jail. I put 'em there."

There's a lost horizon on the Hudson, and ghosts Everett Sloane and Julie Andrews are stuck there as part of a legend that Bing Crosby recalls to fiance Nancy Olson of a ship that completely disappeared, leaving it passengers stuck in a world they could not get out of. Centuries later, Bing Crosby, a descendant of origional settlers lives there, and refuses to sell the property among the high cliff's to crooked land developers Lloyd Corrigan and Hans Conreid. The 1937 Maxwell Anderson play, never made into a film, got a TV musical version with music by Arthur Schwartz and lyrics by Anderson himself. Crosby of course by this time was a legend, and Julie Andrews was just starting out, having succeeded on Broadway in "The Boyfriend" and the same year had a huge success in the original "My Fair Lady". with the original TV "Cinderella" just around the corner, stardom was an assured future.

This is a very amusing TV musical fantasy, very obscure and not as well-known as others, and the score is actually quite lovely. However, I don't ever want to hear Sloane sing "When You're in Love" ever again, as laughable as it is acting is respectable. Crosby basically plays A variation of roles he had been playing for decades, and reunited for the third time here with Nancy Olson, doing here what he knows best, selling a song and making it work. Olsen's character isn't really sympathetic, at least at the beginning, trying to convince Crosby to sell the property so they can have successful and happy financial future together. Corrigan and Conreid are bumbling and hysterical, but their villains are still bullies and deserve to be put into their place. A subplot involving a bank robbery seems out of place with everything that's going on, probably haven work in the original play, but distracting and unnecessary in this.

The real sell of this is the presence of the young Julie Andrews, nearly a decade away from film stardom, and showing the qualities that would make cinema-goers love her from the start. She is perfect as the ghostly presence of a young lady stuck, Aiding lovers Crosby and Olsen in getting past their differences and along with Papa Sloane, arranging for the crooks 2 get their comeuppance and for the hero and heroine to truly get together. The sets are charming and realistic-looking and this is definitely worthy of re-discovery.