Navy Blues

With a ukulele playing in the background, and all those HUGE Hollywood names, how could you NOT have a great time? Haley (The Tin Man!), Ann Sheridan & Jack Carson from SO many great films. Martha Raye, Jackie Gleason. Herb Anderson is in here as the dumb hick; Anderson will be Henry Mitchell, Dennis the Menace's dad in the TV series. Jack Oakie was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in The Dictator. In our story, Cake (Oakie) and Powerhouse (Haley) set up a gambling scam in a get rich quick scheme aboard a navy ship. This film was released in September 1941, so J-U-S-T a couple months before the big surprise at Pearl Harbor. It definitely still has the upbeat, happy go lucky feeling of fun and adventure in the Navy. Their entire gig depends on Homer (Anderson), but of course it all comes apart at the seams. Sound and picture are excellent. The story moves right along. Jack Carson doesn't have much of a role here, but it all works! I had never seen this one before... hopefully Turner will show it often -- it's fun. There's a slightly dirty song about all the things that happen "In Waikiki"... and of course a drag number with Oakie and Haley. I'm surprised at the lower rating, as of today, only 6.5 stars. Directed by Lloyd Bacon, who had started in the silents. Bacon worked with Lucy on a couple films, and made a truckload of war timers during WW II.

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.

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.

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.