Las novias de la marina

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 movie is a wonderful musical. In the 1930s Warner Brothers was the tops when it came to musicals with Busby Berkeley. In the 1940s, Warner Brothers was famous for their gangster, tough movies. But every now in then, Warner Brothers did a musical featuring Ann Sheridan most of the time. Ann Sheridan has a wonderful singing voice, she's up there with Alice Faye and Judy Garland, but today no one really acknowledge her singing. She does a great Hawaiian dance, she looks great dressed in Hawaiian customs. Martha Raye, I think has a special place in everyone heart, is a great comic, and sings some tunes with Ann Sheridan. There's no competition in this film, Ann Sheridan and Martha Raye holds their own and their great together. Together their two great comics, singers, and dancers. Two, forgotten greats of Hollywood. If you can see this movie, try to find it, you won't be sorry. I'm not=)

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.

As another review pointed out, shortly after this comic romp set among Navy enlisted men in Hawaii was made, things took a dramatic and deadly turn with the attack on Pearl Harbor. So that fact needs to be overlooked in order to enjoy this silly movie. (The scene in which an air attack is faked is particularly unfortunate).

All that aside, the main problem with this film is that it's basically one joke extended to an absurdly long running time of over 100 minutes. These types of slight comedies more typically ran around 80 minutes, and with good reason. Even though the running time is padded by the many musical numbers, the comedy routines are repetitive and I found myself wanting to start fast forwarding through them, never a good sign.

On the plus side, we have the always lovely and talented Ann Sheridan, who looks great doing a hula routine. She was an amazingly versatile performer of the type that we just don't see to have anymore. There are also some gifted comic actors (Jack Oakie, Jackie Haley, Martha Raye), though the script is so thin it feels like they are working overtime to be funny. A young, relatively slim Jackie Gleason has some good moments, but one of my favorites, Jack Carson, has a thankless straight man role.

My rating of 6 is based on the fact that I can watch Ann Sheridan in anything. (And this comes pretty close to being "anything.") Also, the historical interest of having a nostalgic snapshot of a more innocent time in history, just before the world changed forever.