In 1917, at Camp Upton in
Yaphank, NY, an officer asked Sgt. Irving Berlin to write a show to help raise
money for the Army. The result was Yip Yip Yaphank, a revue that ran for the
better part of a year, featuring a cast of more than 300 servicemen. In 1942,
Berlin revived the concept for This Is The Army, another soldier-driven
revue that ran for three years; in 1943, Warner Brothers made a feature film
called This Is The Army that combined numbers from both Berlin shows with a loose
retelling of how they came to be. The screen version is more pep rally than
drama, designed to emphasize the sentimental tradition of military service more
than the killing and dying. But it's well-directed by journeyman Michael
Curtiz—who could always be counted on to emphasize how ordinary people
reacted to sweeping historical events—and it's a fascinating document of
the bygone, perhaps never-was America that Army star Ronald Reagan
frequently evoked in his political career.
As such, This Is The
Army
makes a fine anchor for the "Warner Bros. And The Homefront Collection," a
three-disc set that contains two other revue-style inside-showbiz musicals: Thank
Your Lucky Stars,
which is ostensibly about a group of young performers looking for a break, and Hollywood
Canteen,
about a pair of wounded soldiers who spend time at a star-studded rest stop
that caters to the military. Thank Your Lucky Stars is the least essential of
the bunch, though even its procession of unrelated musical numbers—and
its hammy turn by Eddie Cantor, playing "himself"—has a pleasantly
lulling rhythm. Hollywood Canteen is far sweeter, exploring a one-of-a-kind
Shangri-la where movie stars kiss, counsel, and converse with uniformed fans.
The Hollywood Canteen actually existed, which makes the movie more poignant.
There's something appealing about an era when public-spiritedness extended to
everyone having the same set of big-screen heroes and crushes.
Key features: A typically informative commentary track
by Hollywood historians Joan Leslie and Drew Casper on This Is The Army, plus vintage trailers,
wartime newsreels, and shorts on all three discs, and the fascinating Steven
Spielberg-narrated documentary Warner At War.