Anchors Aweigh (1945) - film review

Returning home to a hero’s welcome after WWII, navy personnel Clarence Doolittle and Joe Brady can hardly wait to get ashore and extract every last morsel of pleasure from their leave.  But whilst Joe has a hot date lined up, Clarence is at a loose end and, worse, he lacks both experience and confidence in the woman-baiting department.  Against his better judgement, Joe agrees to help his sailor buddy find a girl.  The evening does not go quite as planned, however.  Instead of painting the town red, Joe and Clarence end up playing wet nurse to a runaway boy named Donald.  Having taken the errant scallywag home, the sailors have to wait until his guardian, Aunt Susan, returns from her night at the opera.   Donald, it seems, is desperately keen to join the navy, but Joe convinces him that he is too young: he must first learn to read and write.  Aunt Susan turns out to be an attractive young woman and as soon as Clarence sets eyes on her he knows she is the woman for him.  Susan, it is revealed, works as a bit player in motion pictures, but her real ambition is to be an opera singer.  The next day, Joe and Clarence pay Susan another visit, and succeed in scaring off a caller, mistaking him for an unwelcome suitor.  In fact the caller was someone with the contacts who could provide Susan with her big break.  Aunt Susan is naturally upset when her one hope of starting a singing career goes up in smoke, but Clarence comes to the rescue by telling her he has fixed up an audition for her with José Iturbi, the great composer and pianist.  Of course, Clarence has done nothing of the kind, but he is confident that with Joe’s help he can persuade Mr Iturbi to give a promising young talent like Susan a few minutes of his time.  Meanwhile, Joe has made a terrible discovery.  He is head over heels in love with Susan...

So who would win your vote for the greatest dancing duo of all time?  Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers?  Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev?  Torvill and Dean?   Surely not!  There can only be one recipient for such an accolade, and that has to be Gene Kelly and Jerry Mouse (you know, the cutely sadistic little rodent from the Tom & Jerry cartoons who inexplicably reminds you of Captain James T. Kirk).   Alas, the only surviving record of Gene and Jerry’s legendary partnership is a dance sequence in an exuberant Hollywood musical entitled Anchors Aweigh (not to be confused with Bankers Away, a popular fantasy of circa 2009 in which every financier on the planet was slowly roasted on a spit over a fire fuelled by the banknotes that made up his last Christmas bonus).

Have corporeal man and animated beast ever performed together with such impeccable style and panache?  History does not report how Gene and Jerry first got together or how their association ended, but we suspect that naughty feline Tom had something to do with it.  Or may be it was Frank Sinatra? 

This was the first time that Sinatra and Kelly appeared together and, presumably on the back of the latter’s bust up with Jerry, they would work together on two more popular film musicals, including the 1949 hit On the Town.  Ol’ Blue Eyes may lack Jerry’s youthful vigour and unbeatable dancing prowess, but he wins hands down in the singing department.   Sinatra’s soul-wrenching rendition of I Fell in Love Too Easily is easily one of the film’s highlights, and the song went on to become one of the singer’s most popular hit records.  

Unpredictable and as stylistically varied as a bag of licorice allsorts or the private tie collection of a TV news presenter, Anchors Aweigh is far from being the conventional Hollywood musical.  Yet, mad as it is, it has all the ingredients that make a musical film so enjoyable and endlessly popular.  Forget the plot – it is too contrived and implausible to merit even a moment’s consideration.  Forget also the strains of jingoism that were probably shoe-horned in at the last moment to give the film greater appeal in the immediate aftermath of WWII (which is when the film was released).  What we should focus on is the magical concoction of comedy, romance, song and dance that director George Sidney so expertly orchestrates, with the help of his talented star performers, including a very famous cartoon mouse.  The cute little kid who looks like the model for Millais’ famous Bubbles painting is none other than Dean Stockwell, one of the few actors to have found success both as a child and as an adult.

Incredible to think that MGM originally wanted Mickey Mouse for that famous mixed live action-animation dance sequence!  Thankfully, Disney declined the offer whilst Hanna and Barbera were more than willing to lend a hand, and their most famous creations.  Gene Kelly and Jerry Mouse, brought together for what is probably the most wonderfully inspired moment of madness in the entire history of Hollywood (all Tom Cruise films excepted, that is).  You have to admire the skill and professionalism of all concerned.  It couldn’t have been easy dancing with a sexless two-dimensional cartoon character.   Still, it was presumably better than being pursued night and day by a viciously psychopathic cat...

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