1h 18min | Comedy, Music, Romance, War | 4 February 1943
Director: Charles Barton
Stars: Ann Miller, William Wright, Dick Purcell
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036306/
bootleg, ok copy.
The hook here is that we don't just listen to the songs, we see the performers onscreen.
Strange that the Mills Bros have 2 numbers (I don't think anyone else does), and they're listed last.
As a dance film, this is disappointing, because, although AM (b. 1923) is onscreen at least a third of the time, she only dances once (finale). This is her 19th of 41 films since 1934. In the Tap! Appendix for AM.
Calling this a war film is stretching it. This could have been released in '41 when we were staffing up, but not yet at war. Only at the very end of the film do we see that the soldiers are being deployed, and in '41 they could have just been off to war games.
In addition to the "romance", another plot thread is: AM wants her own radio show, seizes it, gets fired, gets fanmail, gets re-hired, gets bumped by the prior host, gets reinstated, and between each of these changes she goes back to her old job at the record store, displacing an incompetent clerk who drops the very breakable records at every turn (and we hear him being rehired each time too). It's plenty tedious.
The romance thread has 2 soldiers, one the heir to a chocolate fortune, the other his chauffeur, trading identities to show the chauffeur how girls treat the rich man. Then they have trouble sustaining their deception, because the other soldiers, including AM's brother, know their true identities. Also tedious.
So, hooray for the music and dancing, but ugh for the plot threads.
Columbia, dir. Barton; 6
