The Tanks Are Coming

Beautiful-looking technicolor short about tanks and the training of tank crewmen. It focuses primarily on a comical trainee played by George Tobias. Gig Young, Frank Wilcox, and Richard Travis also star. Filmed mostly on location in Fort Knox, Kentucky. Some really nice footage of the place. I'm a sucker for vintage location shoots like this. I also loved all the tank action footage. It's a pretty informative short with some comedy as well. One thing stuck out to me as odd, though, and admittedly it's kind of nitpicky. It's that in some scenes several of the soldiers have shirts in desperate need of ironing. I always thought that sort of thing was frowned upon in the military. Frank Wilcox in particular has about the most wrinkled shirt I've ever seen and he's playing a colonel!

This movie short was filmed in June 1941 when the United States was starting to begin the anticipated military build for the upcoming war. The film focuses on the new recruit (George Tobias) as he leaves his civilian job with a New York City Cab company for a 1 year hitch with the United States Army Tank Corps. Filmed on location in a pristine Fort Knox, it shows Tobias going through his standard "dumb best friend" acting method all while learning the ins and outs of the new U.S.Army tank. It is a fun movie to watch as you see a very naive America move towards the mobilization needed eventually for WWII. One other note of interest was the use of the then "secret" blitz buggy. This machine is better known by its other nickname, the Jeep.

The considerable talents of George Tobias who played many of the kinds of roles here in feature films, usually in support of the leads. He's an amiable sort of lunkhead who can't bear to be parted with his taxi cab Bessie. He's a hack driver in civilian life and sees no reason he can't take his reliable vehicle into the army with him. So he drives her from New York all the way to Fort Knox, Kentucky where he reports and learns all about the driving, care, and maintenance of a tank.

Through all the propaganda and the attempts at wartime humor which don't really hold up well today, we learn a lot about tanks and their use in wartime. This was in fact the great advance in weaponry from World War I and the Nazis learned the lessons better than the Allied powers did.

Gig Young, Richard Travis, and John Litel are also in the short which did get nominated for Best Short Subject in 1941. Today The Tanks Are Coming is a a slightly amusing bit of history.

Tanks Are Coming, The (1941)

** (out of 4)

Oscar-nominated short has George Tobias playing a new recruit who gives up his taxi cab so that he can join the Army where he soon finds himself driving a tank. This short left me somewhat disappointed but there are still a couple things that make it worth viewing. The first is that it was filmed in three-strip Technicolor and I must say that this is one of the best looking examples of this color. The colors really jump off the screen and it certainly belongs right up there with The Adventures of Robin Hood in terms of its beautiful color. The second reason to watch is because it was actually filmed at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Having grown up fifteen-miles from there, I got an added kick out of how it looked back in the day. With that said, the story itself is a rather weak one and I really didn't get too many kicks out of the comedy style Tobias brought to the film. There were countless pre-WW2 shorts back in the day but this here isn't one of the best.

When World War II started in September, 1939, the United States stayed out of the fray. The vast majority of Americans wanted the country to stay neutral....and despite the seriousness of the war, the US government did little to prepare for war. Jump ahead two years and some things have changed for the US. The war seemed imminent and the American public, for the first time, was behind our getting involved. The problem was that the American armed forces were woefully inadequate....a tiny fraction of how big and well equipped the military needed to be. So, Hollywood and the government worked together--and began making films that glamorized life in the armed services. Among these film were mostly comedies, such as "Buck Privates", "Caught in the Draft" and "Tanks a Million"...all from 1941. Here with "The Tanks Are Coming" they made a comedy/documentary hybrid...also from 1941.

The film features the US Army's tank corps and follows men through classes at Fort Knox, Kentucky. And, the film stars George Tobias as a recruit from Brooklyn who is comic relief. Most of what you see is modern color footage of the best tanks America had, the awful and outclassed M3 light tank. While it's all very patriotic and makes it sound like America is ready for war, the opposite was actually true and the tanks mostly junk compared to the German tanks of the same era.

Overall, it's educational and probably did its best to help the war effort. Mildly enjoyable.

By the way, the poster IMDB shows for this film is wrong...it is from the 1951 film of the same name but the movies are both very different and have nothing to do with each other other than the names.