Three Cheers for the Girls

This compilation of musical numbers from Warner Brothers movies has a lot to recommend it, including Busby Berkley numbers, linking numbers by Jean Negulesco near the end of his musical shorts period, and music by Warren & Dubin.

It's a fairly cheap way of recycling footage, and useful as publicity for reissues of Warner's 1930s musicals; by now, Busby Berkley was at MGM, but the prosperity of people who weren't overseas fighting the war meant they had money spend on cheap luxuries, and a night at the movies counted as one. Also, film production was restricted, which meant that older, well-regarded movies were playing at a lot of theaters.

Just watched this musical compilation short on the Thank Your Lucky Stars DVD. In this one, a bevy of chorus girls sing of their parts in various Warner Bros. musical movies though it's safe to assume since the clips shown are nearly a decade old, none of them were actually participants. Anyway, they're Busby Berkeley sequences that he did for the studio before his eventual departure for M-G-M in 1939. Oh, and the last archived number is actually that of Dick Powell and various men singing "Over the Sea" and "From the Halls of Montezuma". Anyway, this was quite enjoyable and so for that reason, Three Cheers for the Girls is well worth a look.

Three Cheers for the Girls (1943)

*** (out of 4)

Good if extremely cheap short from Warner has them taking clips from their older musicals and throwing them together with a new wraparound story added. Musical numbers from GOLD DIGGERS OF 1935, GOLD DIGGERS OF 1937, FASHIONS OF 1934 and THE SINGING MARINE are just some of the clips shown here. This is somewhat of a hard film to judge because on one hand you have to admit that this thing is pretty cheap by just taking previously seen music clips and putting them together as a "new" movie. With that said, back in 1943 it was extremely hard to see these clips so I'm sure some people enjoyed seeing Dick Powell sing "The Song of the Marines" or David Carlyle doing "I'll Sing You a Thousand Songs" from CAIN AND MABEL. There's no question that these musical clips are nice but at the same time you should really check out the complete movies and see the songs in their original form. The wraparound story really isn't anything too special as we enter the dressing room to some chorus girls who sing us a new song while explaining that they're the ones in these clips that people don't pay attention to. Really? I'm sure many males were checking out these pretty ladies back when they appeared on the screen.

Busby Berkeley was gone, Dick Powell departed angrily from Warner Brothers because they wouldn't give him drramatic parts. But their work appears here in this compilation short subject of their work.

Most of the film is dedicated to the shapely women who appeared in those Berkeley numbers reprised here. As befitting the wartime moments when Three Cheers For The Girls Came Out, the last number is Dick Powell's Song Of The Marines with real World War 2 combat coverage attached.

Berkeley and Powell were gone, but Warner Brothers still made some money off them.