Centennial Summer

An attempt to recapture the family nostalgia of Minnelli's Meet Me in St Louis, made two years earlier, this light musical comedy centres on the Great Exposition of 1876. Sisters Crain and Darnell both drool over dashing Frenchman Cornel Wilde, to the sound of tunes from Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern, who died shortly before the picture was completed. Director Preminger - best remembered now, perhaps, for such adult pictures as Anatomy of a Murder - did a more than adequate job.