Marujos do Amor

MGM was intent on making the most of its hot new properties Kelly and Sinatra in this affable sailor saga. The stars' characters were created with maximum screen impact in mind, and were to be retained (with minor adjustments) in "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" and "On The Town". Gene Kelly plays Joe "Sea Wolf" Brady, the twinkle-eyed Irish womaniser who never quite seems to get a woman. Clarence "Brooklyn" Doolittle, Sinatra's screen persona, was put together as a blatant attempt to pander to his bobbysoxer following. He is the bashful, slightly geeky ingenu, pushing his cuteness for all it's worth - "the romantical type fella".

"Anchors Aweigh" set the pattern for a whole assembly line of MGM musicals to come, and one could almost say it established an art-form. Kelly did the choreography, and his first-ever 'dream ballets', two of them, are on display here - the famous pas de deux with Jerry The Mouse, and the Zorro interlude. The dance sequences are brimming with innovative ideas - mixing human action with animation, artistic use of slow motion, 'playing' the items on the craft stall and bouncing on the beds in the servicemen's hostel.

MGM itself appears, almost as a character in the movie, with self-indulgent shots of the art deco facade and the bustle of the back lot. Jose Iturbi, the Spanish musical director contracted to MGM at the time, plays himself in a slightly odd role. He is the big noise at the studio whom Aunt Susie is anxious to impress, and in a bid to give the meandering storyline some cohesion, he opens the film conducting the Navy band (this strange set-up is 'explained' in a later throwaway line: he was brought in to tighten-up the Navy's musical style). There are two problems with giving Iturbi an important role in the movie - one, nobody has ever heard of Jose Iturbi, and two, his Valencian accent is so strong that it renders him virtually unintelligible. But anyhow, Iturbi conducts the said Navy band, and then an orchestra on the MGM sound stage, playing a "Rhapsody In Blue" rip-off. He presides over Aunt Susie's auditon, and plays some classical stuff at the keyboard (including an interesting "Hungarian Rhapsody" at the Hollywood Bowl, with massed pianos).

The plot (if that is not too choate a term for it) goes thus: an aircraft carrier puts in at San Diego, and two sailors are given shore leave. They encounter a little boy who leads them to his pretty Aunt Susie, a taco joint chanteuse who dreams of the big time. Without giving the game away, I can reveal that more than one person falls in love Susie, leading to the customary complications and misunderstandings. The energy and exuberance of the performances, and particularly that of Kelly, carry the madcap action along nicely, and the eccentricities of a storyline which goes from mariachi groups to Tom And Jerry don't seem so very outlandish after all. This new brand of musical comedy, breaking completely with the pre-war conventions of tuxedos and ocean liners, is attractive and refreshing.

Young Mister Sinatra, under a separate contract from the others, sings numbers specially written for him by Jules Styne and Sammy Cahn. By far the best of these formulaic boy-crooner ballads is the final one, "I Fall In Love Too Easily". Throughout the film, Frank sings in his upper register, aiming for a light ballad sound, and consequently not doing any justice to that reedy baritone voice.

The film has attractive visual gimmicks, quite apart from the man-and-cartoon-mouse stuff. Iturbi plays a transparent keyboard, shot from below. In a clever comment on the storyline, Joe rises from the table and physically comes between Clarence and Susie. The string section of the orchestra is filmed playing pizzicato in the reflection of Iturbi's grand piano.

Katherine Grayson is more than adequate playing the female ingenue, and her voice is spectacular, if a little too showy and operatic. The screen test is a knockout coloratura performance.

The film falls away a little towards the end. The Hollywood Bowl is incorporated, one feels, merely to give the movie a photogenic location to use, and this passage distorts the storyline somewhat. The fallings in and out of love are totally arbitrary, and the resolutions hurried and thin. But for all that, "Anchors Aweigh" is fun to watch, and its stylistic innovations paved the way for the great MGM musicals of the next ten years.

I love these old musicals where they seemed to throw in everyone under contract with the studio. I love the classical music, with Iturbi's very old school highly arched fingers doing amazing things on the keyboard while he also conducted. I love bringing in the next generation of performers. I love the silliness. I love Gene Kelly giving the studio insurance agents palpitations in the bandit scene and calling Kathryn Grayson "Aunt Susie." I love the whole wonderful mishmash. There's something for everyone and if it runs long, well, you can pick which musical number to miss for your bathroom break. :) I wish all the songs were credited at the end but that wasn't the custom then. This has one of my two favorite on screen renditions of the Hungarian Rhapsody. The other was done by Bugs Bunny being bedeviled by a mouse. These musicals are time capsules of great talents, fashions, musical tastes, and movie techniques. I've seen this many times and I hope to see it many more.

What surprises me here is how good Sinatra is. He's certainly playing against his later cock-sure image. No king of the walk here. Instead his Clarence (note the name) is likable but chock-full of self-doubt. And he's very good at being shy, retiring, and charming in a boyish way. It's a Sinatra as I've never seen him. On the other hand, there's the boldly self-assured Joe (Kelly) who dominates, as the two sailors try to get a big-time audition for the winsome Susan (Grayson). Somehow, however, they can't reach big-time impresario Jose Iturbi. But they and we have a good time trying.

Along the way, Kelly gets his legendary dance with cartoon mouse Jerry of Tom & Jerry, looking like it came right out of the Land of Oz. Then too, I like his really charming number with the little Mexican girl (McManus). Overall, however, it's the elaborate sets, glossy Technicolor, and sparkling personalities that shine. Frankly, I thought the musical selections were entertaining but nothing memorable. Also the storyline meanders a bit too much, particularly near the end. Note too how classical numbers are worked into the selections, quite typical for that time. I guess producers wanted to broaden the musical appeal, and lend a touch of 'class'.

All in all, the movie's MGM at it's glossy best. And though a bit overlong, the results still fit the classic bill, along with the perfect pairing of the two male leads.

Famous for the scene where Gene Kelly dances a duet with Jerry Mouse, this zippy musical is also the one where Kathryn Grayson trills 'Jealousy', and Frank Sinatra sings in the arena of a thousand pianos ('I Fall in Love Too Easily'). Grayson is a young mother who wants more than anything else to be in the movies. Her little boy (Dean Stockwell, who would turn up much later in TV's Quantum Leap) wants to join the US forces, and so he meets sailors Kelly and Sinatra heading out for a bit of leave. There are some echoes of 'On the Town' in this movie, but not enough to spoil the mix.

Since I first saw Anchors Aweigh in 1945, viewing it on videotape holds a lot of nostalgia for me. At age 15, it was easy for me to be drawn into the first of the great MGM Technicolor musicals. Now I am perhaps most interested in thinking about the future careers of the leading players. Though Sinatra had done a couple of negligible films soon after his emergence after his Dorsey days, as a solo singer, this was his first major film appearance. As another viewer noted, this seems almost to be a warm-up for On the Town. Sinatra may have had to work hard at it, but his dance with Kelly is credible, and he would do better in their next pairings. However, observing his physique, it's easy to see why he was caricatured as a string bean. Who would have imagined that within a decade he would win an academy award for acting, and go on to play many roles as a tough detective or leader in combat. Though Gene Kelly's personality and dancing dominated this film, his winsome performance did not suggest that he would become a major creative force, almost the iconic figure, for MGM musicals, where he developed a style of dance complementary to that of Fred Astaire. Finally, it was strange to see the fresh-faced Dean Stockwell and remember that he would later play a "thrill" killer in Compulsion, based on the Leopold-Loeb murder from the 1920s. An additional note: One reviewer praised the performance of Betty Garrett as Sinatra's love interest. She later played opposite him in On the Town, but Pamela Britton was featured in this film.