Words and Music - Region 1 DVD

The film's sense of time is deranged: Perry Como plays an early friend of R&H, then decades later, himself; Garbo's Camille is shown as a silent film, although it was released 10 years after sound came in; and the grown-up Judy Garland plays herself in a period when she would have been a child. The upside is that Garland romps through "Johnny One Note," one of many examples of Lorenz Hart's lyrical dexterity. Tom Drake is a dull Rodgers, but Mickey Rooney's buzz-saw energy and crazed appetite might have made a brilliant Larry Hart. In a better movie, that is. --Robert Horton