2h 2min | Comedy, Drama, Musical, War | 5 May 1944
Directors: A. Edward Sutherland (as Eddie Sutherland), John Rawlins (uncredited)
Stars: George Raft, Vera Zorina, Grace McDonald.
George Hale ... musical numbers devised and staged by
George Balanchine ... dance director (uncredited)
own a copy on AmazonVideo; mediocre print
The plot is: ex-vaudeville hoofer GR comes to H'wood in search of work. While dancing in the chorus, he connects himself to the star VZ, and romance - and his stardom - bloom in montage. They marry. Then the war intervenes, and he's rejected from service, so he leads the stars to perform for servicemen at home and overseas. But wife VZ is pregnant, and it's a difficult case. Just when she's about to tell him about the blessed event, he's blustering around in a hurry about the camp shows and command performances. So they separate, and she goes to a sanitarium for bedrest. Spoiler: he gets blown up on a transport ship, the only non-survivor, because he was at the exact location of the torpedo strike, looking for a friend. After she has the baby, she heads out to entertain the troops overseas too. (No idea who's tending the kid.) The End
But all of that is about 1/10th of the screen time. This is mostly a compendium of performances, with an emphasis on quaNtity of stars shown, making each act very short. And I don't remember any good dancing. Zorina does just a little. Donald O'Connor and Peggy Ryan do a bickering teen sort of dance onstage before a large gathering of servicemen. (Maybe I'm really not missing much with DO's work being out of circulation.) George Raft's dancing is dull, but he's almost 50 in '44, and hadn't earned his keep as a dancer in a long time.
Marlene Dietrich is centered on the poster, but she's only briefly onscreen: at the H'wood meeting, and as the woman Orson Welles saws in half.
We get a couple of black acts, and one of them might have entertained a white unit, the other definitely entertained a black unit. But even when they show the H'wood "celebrities" (most of whom I didn't recognize, so possibly extras) meeting to discuss this idea, the black actors (Louise Beavers I know) were sitting segregated from the rest, and I think the camera (possibly also the filming schedule) segregated them from whites.
Universal, dir. Sutherland & Rawlins; 6-
