Navy Blues

The best musicals offer memorable songs imaginatively staged. "Navy Blues" offers neither. Both composer Arthur Schwartz ("Dancing in the Dark") and lyricist Johnnie Mercer ("Hurray for Hollywood") did much better work elsewhere, as did choreographer Seymour Felix ("The Great Ziegfeld").

The leads are only so-so. Oomph girl Ann Sheridan looks great and Martha Raye is suitably brassy, but Jacks Haley and Oakie are hardly Abbott and Costello, and Herbert Anderson is woeful as Sheridan's romantic interest.

Plots are always secondary in musicals, though sometimes they help pick up the pace. Here, a typically thin story line is a good 20 minutes too long.

For all these weaknesses "Navy Blues" has some interesting aspects.

The cast features the already rotund Jackie Gleason in his first film. He doesn't have very many lines but you can't miss him as a young sailor named Tubby. Had this been made a decade later he would have been a natural for Oakie's role.

More significantly, this is a last look at the United States Navy on the eve of World War Two. These are real ships and real sailors on the brink of history.

When Oakie and Haley's characters disembark at Honolulu (actually San Diego), the ship in the background is the USS Curtiss, a seaplane tender that a few months later was damaged at Pearl Harbor. Twenty-one of her crew were killed on December 7th.

Other scenes appear to have been shot on an Astoria class heavy cruiser, of which there were six. The following year three of these ships were sunk off Guadalcanal, with great loss of life.

Surely many of the sailors parading behind the cast members in the closing sequence would not survive the war. Few could foresee that in the spring of 1941, but for us that sad fact gives the film a poignancy its makers never intended.

This is a lightweight musical produced by Warners who were lost finding something for Ann Sheridan to do, I am sure that she would not have classed it as one of her better films. Whoever came up with the hog-calling sequences, and that Anderson guy to do them definitely needed to get another job!! It was great to see two such beauties as Kay Aldridge and Marguerite Chapman supporting Ann Sheridan in the "Waikiki" number, which was clearly the highlight of the whole movie. Martha Raye and Jackie Gleason were good and certainly added to the fun, but Jack Oakie's double-take humour definitely wears thin over 90 minutes. Warners trotted out a lot of their stock players for this one, and they were all adequate in what was really a B- Film.

A Warners musical that feels more like Paramount, with the Paramount contractee Martha Raye in a lead and a lightheartedness that one doesn't associate with Warners. And Jack Haley and Jack Oakie, as lovable-bumbling Navy men, try to get a Hope and Crosby rhythm going (their relationship is also very Dennis Morgan-Jack Carson, who did this sort of thing at Warners a few years later; Carson, meanwhile, is here as their exasperated commanding officer, taking lots of pratfalls and water-in-the-face takes). Ann Sheridan is around to be glamorous and sing, pleasantly, and Herbert Anderson is given something of a (failed) star buildup as her love interest. But the real stars are songwriters Arthur Schwartz and Johnny Mercer, who open the film with a ten-minute title song with yards of plot-exposition lyrics and follow it up with unusually funny, incisive, tuneful songcrafting. The plotting isn't up to much, and it's overlong, but the musical numbers are all keepers.

Before Pearl Harbor which occurred at the end of 1941 all the studios were doing more and more military oriented films as if to get America used to seeing our sons and occasional daughters in uniform. Navy Blues is far from blue, it's your typical service comedy with a cast of scene stealing players.

Any film with Jack Haley, Jack Oakie, Jack Carsonand Martha Raye ought to be given a look on general principles. The Haley and Oakie are a pair of connivers who beg, borrow, and steal a whole lot of money for bets to win the annual gunnery competition because they learn the gunner that's won it is transferring to their ship. But this is Herbert Anderson's last duty because his hitch is up before the contest.

What to do before they're killed by their shipmates is get Anderson some incentive. The only thing he's interested in is Ann Sheridan, who wouldn't be? So it's every wile and stratagem they can use including Sheridan's pal Martha Raye.

I can't forget the third Jack in this hand, that being Carson. He's playing Oakie and Haley's CPO whom they have to outwit on all occasions. All three Jacks settle nicely in roles were used to seeing them in.

Look fast there's a fourth Jack, Jackie Gleason. But he's hardly utilized at all. Arthur Schwartz and Johnny Mercer wrote some forgettable original songs, but the comedy is the real treat.

This had to be the only time Herbert Anderson gets the girl in a movie. This is a typical role for him, tall goofy guy. Later on he did serious parts in Battleground and Night Passage. Best known as Dennis The Menace's TV father.

With all the comic talent here you can't go wrong with Navy Blues.

... and a reminder how everything can change in an instant. This movie is about two American sailors (Jack Oakie and Jack Haley) on shore leave in Honolulu who find out that another ship's master gunner is actually transferring to THEIR ship before the gunnery competition begins between the two ships, and nobody knows but the two goofball sailors and the sailor who is transferring. They are always on the losing end of any bets, so here they finally have a no lose situation. They borrow 200 dollars from one of their more financially savvy shipmates - and believe me the way these two goofballs throw around money that could be just about anybody - and place bets on their ship winning at 15:1 odds. They figure they will clean up so they pawn off the ship's trophies to get even more betting money, figuring everyone is on shore leave and nobody will notice or mind. After they win they will buy the trophies back before anyone knows they are missing. They can't lose - right? WRONG. The Midwestern corn-fed dead-eye shot (Herbert Anderson) is due to have his enlistment run out 12 days before the competition, and he really is homesick for his farm, so the rest of the movie has to do with Oakie and Haley getting him to change his mind and reenlist.

At 108 minutes long, this movie is just TOO long. At a time when films often ran 80 minutes, that would have been a more appropriate running time. There are too many lame jokes, that are lame precisely because situations run on too long, and the subplots would have been funnier if they had been more to the point.

What's good about this movie? I really loved the big band big musical numbers with Ann Sheridan singing. The title song is particularly catchy. You also get a glimpse of Jackie Gleason when he is starting out, Jack Carson just as he arrives at Warner Brothers where he really perfects his somewhat unlikeable "gray guy" persona, and Martha Raye is used to good effect as the ex-wife of one of the goofball sailors who demands she gets her alimony.

As for me mentioning this film is a moment captured in time - consider this. The film was made three months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. As the sailors keep mentioning, they joined the navy "to see the world", which is what you did in peacetime which was about to end. Honolulu was the playground of that peacetime navy, just as depicted in the film (actually filmed in San Diego). Thus something I just couldn't get out of my mind as I watched this somewhat silly yet utterly enjoyable 1941 film about the Navy in Hawaii was that it gives no hint of the horror to come - how could it?, and probably thus had a very narrow window in time in which it was the least bit relevant before it would have to be put in mothballs for probably at least ten years or else it would appear almost flippant to those going through WWII and then afterwards, to those who had been through it and survived.