One of these days I’m going to have to get around to actually watching the films adapted from Tarkington’s novels… and there are scads of them, featuring luminaries from Hollywood’s past.  In the present case, Presenting Lily Mars was adapted by MGM (and apparently faithfully, relatively speaking) with young star Judy Garland.  The film is available on DVD, and the New York Sun offers a review in a musical pair-up with Fiddler on the Roof.  Toward the bottom of the article, Gary Giddens gets around to talking about Mars:

Making Tevye dramatically authentic was probably an easier call than that facing MGM and a 20-year-old Judy Garland, who in 1943 was beyond an adolescence of capers with Mickey Rooney. She had already appeared in 15 feature films, including an adult role in 1942’s “For Me and My Gal,” when the producer Joseph Pasternak bought Booth Tarkington’s 1933 novel “Presenting Lily Mars” as her next vehicle — the oddest musical in her résumé and consequently a cult film.

Clearly, MGM didn’t see her as a contemporary woman (”For Me and My Gal” is set during World War I). Yet they compromised, bringing the story to the present while deciding that the music should be (extra light) operetta — perfect for Deanna Durbin, then at her peak, but all wrong for the greatest song belter since Al Jolson.

Then someone had another thought: this swing thing that had been going on for a decade. So they added guest appearances by the Bob Crosby and Tommy Dorsey bands. Then someone else, reportedly Louis B. Mayer, complained that the picture looked kind of chintzy, so why not reshoot a grand finale, reviving a good old MGM tune from 1929, “Broadway Melody”? As a result, “Presenting Lily Mars” is three films in one, and as no one likes all three parts, it’s usually dismissed as a dud.

I sing the praises of Part 1, the first 40 minutes, played unexpectedly for laughs, with Judy doing mustache-twirling readings of Lady Macbeth and a refugee from “Way Down East,” as several sibling moppets imitate her every emotion…