Meet the Fleet

Meet the Fleet (1940)

** (out of 4)

Warner short has a familiar story but some recognizable stars that make it worth sitting through. The film follows three recruits (George Reeves, Herbert Anderson, William T. Orr) as they go through basic training and have to deal with their Petty Officer (Robert Armstrong). Reeves is best known for SUPERMAN and Armstrong for KING KONG so there are two familiar faces that film buffs will want to see but outside of that this film doesn't have too much going for it. Even by 1940, this type of story was pretty drawn out to the point where people would be scratching their heads and asking for something original. The entire film is pretty much of mockery of everything that would be going on in the Navy and once again Armstrong is playing that moron that he played in countless films. I love seeing him but he just doesn't have much to do here. The Technicolor is the one saving grace and there's a great scene in a library where the colors really jump off the screen.

Strictly cornball stuff.

I went through training at San Diego and the only realism between basic training and this film are the background shots actually filmed at the San Diego base.

The story is a contrived bit of nonsense about three recruits (WILLIAM T. ORR, GEORGE REEVES and HERBERT ANDERSON), who are supervised by Chief Petty Officer ROBERT ARMSTRONG.

Predictably, Orr--who wants to see the ocean badly--gets seasick on his first outing on a boat--and the others are standard stock characters. Anderson is a guy who memorized the color chart (he's color blind) so he could enter the service. Reeves is your All-American boy.

Most of it is on the light side, played for laughs, and it was probably used as a good recruiting film for the U.S. Navy at the time. Excellent color photography and some good glimpses of guys undergoing physical training--but the story is sheer nonsense.

Worth a look if you're interested in training films but not much else can be said about it. The actors do well enough with sub-standard material.

As the other reviewers have noted, there's not a lot of dramatic value to be had here. But it is fun to see the four main stars (Armstrong, Reeves, Anderson, and Orr, all of whom were ubiquitous in films & TV during the '30s through the '60s) kicking around together. Even more significantly, this little propaganda quicky from 1940, in beautiful technicolor, shows San Diego naval base as it actually was at that time (so does "Dive Bomber," come to think of it, made just a little later by the same studio and with two of the same cast members in it). The opening and closing scenes featuring the USS Pennsylvania are poignant, however, because that very ship was at Pearl Harbor (in drydock) on 12/7/41. And her only sister ship was the USS Arizona.