The Glenn Miller Story
1953
Boulder
Feature Film
DIRECTED BY
Anthony Mann
STARRING
James StewartJune AllysonHarry MorganCharles DrakeGeorge Tobias
PRODUCTION TYPE
Feature Film
PRODUCTION COMPANY
Universal-International Pictures
RELEASE DATE
February 10, 1954
FILMED IN BOULDER
Boulder County’s contribution is narrow and entirely the University of Colorado’s campus playing itself. Glenn Miller enrolled at CU in 1923 and met Helen Burger, a Boulder woman, there. When Universal-International sent a unit to Colorado in the summer of 1953, Helen Miller pressed the filmmakers to shoot the college passages where they had actually happened, and CU itself credits her for it.
The unit worked a single sweltering day on campus, putting James Stewart and June Allyson at Varsity Lake and its bridge, though the bridge that reaches the screen is a reproduction built back in California after technical problems with the original. Every other Colorado location the production used sits in Denver County: the Civic Center, the Elitch Gardens ballroom, and a hangar at Lowry Air Force Base.
ABOUT
Anthony Mann’s biography of the bandleader opens on a broke young trombonist who keeps pawning his horn between pickup gigs, chasing a sound of his own that he has not yet found. It follows him out of lean years of sideman work, back to Helen Burger, the Colorado sweetheart he had very nearly let slip away, and on to the orchestra whose sound became a signature of the swing era.
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