For those who love to watch flag waving men in uniform doing musical numbers in drag, this film is your heaven. Add a little minstrel show, black face comedy, and a variety of acts from a magician to star impersonators, to acrobats to Air Force and Navy glee clubs and you have one of the gayest pieces of pro-military pop-corn imaginable. This is a 1943 version of the Ed Sullivan Show on steroids.
This movie seems to have A.D.D. It moves from subject to subject in a rather willy-nilly fashion, but it is tied together with waving flags and marching/tap dancing men in uniform, and the fact that Irving Berlin wrote both the two or three classic songs and the fourteen or fifteen duds. One could watch every scene in reverse order and get the same effect. It is a parade celebrating pro patria mori. It is a broken record that just keeps repeating that it is glorious to be a soldier because it is not glorious to be a soldier.
Yet, it lacks conviction, which is what makes it such tiresome propaganda. Why is it arguing that World War II is a continuation of World War I? Why does it have twenty minutes of men in drag singing and dancing, but only one minute of men in battle? Why is it advocating that men should get married before they go off to war? Why does it say that war is hell because you have to get up early in the morning, especially when every working man in America had to get up at the same time? There is something chilling about this movie: the way it uses song and dance and vaudeville theater to promote war. What I can not figure out is why I love Michael Curtiz's "Yankee Doodle Dandy" which celebrated George M. Cohan's patriotic song contributions, while I disliked this movie which celebrates the same thing in Irving Berlin? Maybe it is because James Cagney glides across the screen with grace and an open heart, while this movie is just an army trampling everything in its path.
This movie seems to have A.D.D. It moves from subject to subject in a rather willy-nilly fashion, but it is tied together with waving flags and marching/tap dancing men in uniform, and the fact that Irving Berlin wrote both the two or three classic songs and the fourteen or fifteen duds. One could watch every scene in reverse order and get the same effect. It is a parade celebrating pro patria mori. It is a broken record that just keeps repeating that it is glorious to be a soldier because it is not glorious to be a soldier.
Yet, it lacks conviction, which is what makes it such tiresome propaganda. Why is it arguing that World War II is a continuation of World War I? Why does it have twenty minutes of men in drag singing and dancing, but only one minute of men in battle? Why is it advocating that men should get married before they go off to war? Why does it say that war is hell because you have to get up early in the morning, especially when every working man in America had to get up at the same time? There is something chilling about this movie: the way it uses song and dance and vaudeville theater to promote war. What I can not figure out is why I love Michael Curtiz's "Yankee Doodle Dandy" which celebrated George M. Cohan's patriotic song contributions, while I disliked this movie which celebrates the same thing in Irving Berlin? Maybe it is because James Cagney glides across the screen with grace and an open heart, while this movie is just an army trampling everything in its path.