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As long as young hearts endure, so will National Velvet and movies like it. in her star-making role, Elizabeth Taylor plays Velvet Brown, a wide-eyed adolescent who, assisted by her jockey pal (Mickey Rooney), trains Pie, a horse she won in a raffle, for the Grand National Steeplechase. Of course, no girl can ride in the National, can she? Yet Velvet, posing as a boy, assuredly does. Superbly directed by Clarence Brown, this exciting winner of two Academy Awards * (one to Anne Revere for her performance as Velvet's mother) costars a young Angela Lansbury and veteran Donald Crisp. The film has an off-screen postscript as winning as the on-screen finale: The studio gave Pie to Taylor after filming wrapped.

Description

It's social season in London, and amid the swirl of coming-out balls, the aristocratic Broadbents (real-life marrieds Rex Harrison and Kay Kendall) are intent on giving their American-educated 17-year-old daughter, Jane (Sandra Dee), the right entry into society and a proper upper-class beau. One complication: Flighty Mabel Claremont (Angela Lansbury) is eager to match that same beau with her daughter. And another: Jane, of course, has her own ideas about these matters -- and an eye for a guy (John Saxon) who's a drummer in the dance band. Comedy is in season for The Reluctant Debutante, a rib-tickler of societal foibles and follies given spirited direction by Vincente Minnelli and featuring a full dance card of deft badinage.

Description

Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr and Lana Turner--three of the most glamorous leading ladies of the Golden Age of Hollywood--star with Jimmy Stewart as young women each chosen for a life of fame on stage as a Ziegfeld Girl. Susan Gallagher (Academy Award winner Garland--The Wizard of Oz, A Star is Born) leaves her vaudevillian father to climb the ladder of stardom; Sheila Regan (Turner--The Postman Always Rings Twice) drops her loyal beau, Gilbert Young (Academy Award winner Stewart-- The Philadelphia Story) for socialite Geoffrey Collins (Ian Hunter--Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), and Young resorts to bootlegging to earn the money to win Regan back; and the exotic Sandra Kolter (Lamarr--Tortilla Flat, Samson and Delilah) nearly destroys her marriage with her struggling violinist husband (Philip Dorn--I Remember Mama). Now, as part of the most glamorous show ever staged, these ladies have attained their dreams .