1h 7min | Musical | 5 July 1943
Director: Joseph Santley
Stars: Brenda Joyce, Richard Fraser, Elsa Lanchester
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036436/
Watched online, mediocre/poor copy, sound got out of sync.
4 songs; all but the title song by Styne and Cahn.
2 very dark black men in zoot suits did some nice tapping, entertaining the workers at lunch. Only 1 person is credited as a dancer, and 2 as 'jitterbug sailors', so they are not in the credits. The film is not in the Tap! Appendix, but should be for the zoots. (The most visible jitterbuggers weren't sailors; I'd identify those as army dress uniforms. We did see sailors on the same dance floor.)
Only interesting for its wartime particulars:
- as a safety film for factory work: tie your hair up in a kerchief, and be sure to tuck in the ends. Wrap the controller by its cord on a ladder leg, so it doesn't accidentally fall on the ground and get activated while someone's hand is in the machine.
- as a morale/morals film, encouraging people to sacrifice their personal/professional lives for the war effort. They talk about professionals giving up their education-dependent jobs for factory work because that is more essential now. So when they learn the showbiz girl has only taken the factory job to audition for a show (that was going to employ only factory workers as a gimmick, and are you taking them offline, or just exhausting them to create hazards?), she is shunned by the whole factory.
Republic, dir. Santley; 5
