The Bugle Sounds

I never understood MGM insisting on putting the very rotund and almost elderly Wallace Beery in WWII era war films. While not as ridiculous as Laurel & Hardy in "Great Guns", the films do make it look like the USA was scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel to fill the ranks of the army!! In "The Bugle Sounds", it's not only a 57 year-old Beery, but his commanding officers 63 year-old Lewis Stone and 51 year-old Henry O'Neill! As a result, this seems like a geezer war film!

The film finds Sergeant 'Hap' Doan serving with pride in the US Cavalry....an anachronism considering how modern WWII was. Using horses in combat was akin to using bows & arrows against the Luftwaffe! Still, despite the complete ineffectiveness of the horse in modern combat, Hap is angry that the horses are being replaced by tanks...and he wants to quit....but there's a war on and apparently they needed even the help of hapless Hap...who spends an awful lot of time complaining. In fact, during much of the story, Hap just complains and complains about how he hates tanks and how wonderful horses are. Where does all this go?

This film is very formulaic and I found myself telling my wife how the whole thing would end about halfway through the movie...and I was, sadly, 100% right. And, if you've seen a lot of old movies, it clearly IS predictable. If you haven't, the film might work better for you. It also is very schmaltzy and is seemed dated even by the time the movie was released. Overall, you could easily do better with most of Beery's other films.

The year is 1941. Sergeant "Hap" Doan (Wallace Beery) is an old cavalry man and looks down on the new tanks. The Nineteenth Cavalry is forced to change into a mechanized force. The national emergency needs new fighting forces fast and they need to be mechanized. The horse is obsolete. Hap is angry and bitter. Susie (Marjorie Main) runs the local diner.

I am a little confused with the people's reactions and the time period. They should be more serious with the world at war. The cavalry guys would see this longtime coming. Some of this feels off. Also Pearl Harbor happened right before the release of this movie. I don't know what people felt watching this movie back then. They probably wanted to watch anything with the military. I would be nice if Hap is eager to learn but is hapless with the tank. I think that would be funnier. Then there is the serious turn and that really threw me off.

In real life Wallace Beery was far from the lovable oaf he was normally cast as. In fact he could be one downright nasty person. But such was his public image and MGM made a lot of money off that image. In the case of The Bugle Sounds however, the image was strained beyond belief in a film that could never be made other than for propaganda purposes during World War II.

Beery like George S. Patton in real life is an old horse cavalry soldier who is not crazy about the fact that cavalry is a thing of the past. Of course if he was any kind of observant during World War I where it is said he served as well as in the Pancho Villa campaign, he would have seen just how useless horses are in the trench warfare that was World War I in France. Patton sure adapted to mechanized warfare, but Beery just can't get it.

Nevertheless when Colonel Lewis Stone orders him to whip some of those new draftees into shape for the new mechanized army he does what he's told. But when one of the tanks goes awry and kills his favorite old campaign horse, Beery goes bonkers.

There's also some nasty sabotage afoot here led by cashiered soldier George Bancroft and Jerome Cowan in a laughable Teutonic accent. It all gets pretty silly before the film is over.

Marjorie Main was opposite Beery as she was in many films, but even their on screen chemistry couldn't do much here. And believe me the chemistry was strictly on screen. I don't know how much good The Bugle Sounds did for young Donna Reed as the earnest young wife of William Lundigan, one of Beery's recruits. Beery works for Main at her greasy spoon restaurant.

Even the presence of such scene stealing players as Eddie Acuff, Guinn Williams, and Chill Wills all playing sergeants and Beery's peers in terms of military service don't elevate this film.

The Bugle Sounds is a textbook case of the military propaganda film rendered laughable by time. And a great example of what MGM gave Wallace Beery to sell before the American movie-going public.

What can be said about this movie that? It's highly formulaic yet lovable due to the charismatic lead performance by its star, one of the great ones Wallace Beery. He plays a role he had a played a thousand times before, that of the lovable doofus who always screws up but seems to make things right by the end. It is a popular hollywood archetype. The plot is about tanks replacing horses in the cavalry and Beery's resistance to it. Laughs are obviously got out of this situation but in the last reel it becomes an effective thriller/action movie with the last five minutes become the absolution pretty intense. Formulaic MGM stuff from the forties but a good introduction to Beery for first-timers.

Saw this a while back on the usual TV channel, and enjoyed it very much. In terms of quality, it's maybe a 2.5, but it rates a 5, at least, for historical interest. From the tommygun scabbard on Beery's horse, to the officer(?) telling the recruits that the 37mm popgun will take out any tank in the world, to the fact that the villainous spy/saboteurs have risible "German" accents but are never identified ass such, this is a perfect "Preparedness Era" (between September, 1939 and December 7, 1941) movie. Watch it for what it is; don't criticize it for what it never could have been.