Textures of the 1940s on Film

The Andrews Sisters in "Buck Private"

It is said that when people get interested in a period of the past, it is usually the era of their parents.  That's been true of me in recent years, when for various reasons I've been intrigued by the 1930s and 1940s.  Partly because there were some significant but not sufficiently known achievements--various Depression era programs like the CCCs and the Federal Theatre Project, then the GI Bill and the Marshall Plan in the 40s--but also because I am connected to these years through my parents, grandparents and older relatives.

I am also connected through the movies and television shows of my youth that were about this era and/or featured entertainers, directors and so on from this era.  Much of early television was actually late radio with somewhat moving pictures.  Many of its stars went back through radio and movies to the Vaudeville era.

So in addition to more serious reading, I like going back to the era's popular culture and entertainment.  I love the Swing era, the Big Bands, for example.  But recently I decided to tap into another connection with a set of 1940s movies called 8 Wartime Comedies.

The set features a couple of Abbot & Costello films, one Francis the Talking Mule movie, comedies starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Tony Curtis, and one comedy classic: Preston Sturges' Hail the Conquering Hero.

I probably saw some of these movies before, mostly on television, though when I was very young my father took me to see one of the Francis the talking mule service-oriented movies (with Donald O'Connor) at a local theatre, and perhaps one of the Abbot & Costello or similar themed films by Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.  These entertainers were all regularly on television in the early 1950s.

I had to cross a kind of barrier to get back to these movies, though.  Vietnam soured me on attempts to hoodwink people about war through trivial entertainment and phony glamour. The idea of "wartime comedy" remains jarring.  But unlike the satires of the 60s and 70s which were about war (and atomic self-destruction), these movies aren't really set during a war, and aren't about war.  But they are pretty interesting in revealing the mindset of the times.

With this set I've only seen the two Abbot and Costello movies so far.  They were both made and released after what became World War II had started, but before the US officially entered the war against the Axis powers.  Though barely--they were both released in 1941.  Both were big box office hits.

Buck Privates was made first, and was set in 1940, just after the military draft was reinstituted.   (It was also when the US population was 130 million, some 200 million fewer people than now.  In fact, just 60 million more than one-third of today's population.)

 The beginning is a good primer on official attitudes then.  It's clear the US was gearing up for the war, and the participation of the "ordinary guy"--factory worker, farmer, etc.--was emphasized.  But the official theme was defense--defending America against potential but unnamed enemies.

The comedy team of Bud Abbot and Lew Costello play small time confidence men, trying to sell men's ties on the street, when they try to escape from police by joining what they think is a line into a movie theatre, but instead is an Army draft call.  They wind up in the Army.

The subplot involves the first man to be drafted (Alan Curtis), a patriotic working guy, and the rich son of an influential man in Washington (Lee Bowman) who tries to use influence to get out of the draft, unsuccessfully.  They compete for the attentions of the same woman (Jane Franzee), and of course, the rich guy wises up and saves the life of the working guy, and they go off to officer candidate school together.

The movie gets women into it by inventing a corps of women "hostesses" in uniform who accompany recruits to their training camp to keep up their morale (and since it is 1940, that's all.)  This also is the excuse for the presence of the other stars of the movie--and one of its principal attractions to me today--the Andrews Sisters.  This trio of close harmony swing singers was very popular in the 40s, but not a lot of film of them seems to exist from that era.  This movie includes their signature hit of the times, "The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy,"  as well as another of their hits, "Apple Blossom Time."

They prove to be a highlight of this movie--not only their singing performance, but their dancing. There's also a number that features a group called The World Champion Boogie-Woogie Dancers, and several of them provide some of the best 40s dancing of the many films that include it.

Abbot and Costello's comedy is gentler and less dependent on slapstick than I remember, although there's not much that's laugh out loud funny.  (Somehow it is pretty funny when a bugler plays Reveille and Costello shouts for somebody to turn off that alarm clock. Had to be there funny anyway.)

This movie was released in January 1941 and was an instant hit, so Universal rushed another one into production.  They certainly could make movies fast in those days--In the Navy shot from April 8 to May 8 and was released on May 30, even with a reshoot that the Navy requested, all in 1941.  Once again, the Andrews Sisters were featured, but another star was added in Dick Powell.

Unfortunately the haste shows.  The script is dull, the songs are dull, and the Andrews Sisters numbers lack focus and care.  Dick Powell does one flat song and not much else.  Clare Dodd is wasted as the comedic love interest. The rear-screen projection is painfully obvious and even the editing is sloppy.  The Abbot and Costello comedy is funnier, though, as they tapped into their classic Vaudeville-style routines--several of which I remembered from their early 50s television show.

But here's the thing about films of the past: they have context that inevitably includes the times in which they are seen.  Or in this case, simply what soon came after.

A couple jumped out at me from this movie.  One is race.  An all-white cast in a 1940s movie is hardly unexpected, though less frequent than you might think in movies that involved bands and music.  But in this film, the Andrews Sisters actually do a song about the Harlem expression "give me some skin" without a black person in sight.

The Nicholas Brothers in the Glenn Miller film Sun Valley Serenade

That might have gone by except for a dance specialty number by the Condos Brothers.  The famous dancing brothers of the era were the Nicholas Brothers, but they were black.  The Condos Brothers were white imitators.  The two 1940s films that Glenn Miller made both include a Nicholas Brothers dance, though it is a separate routine that looks designed to be cut out for Southern theatres.  Once actual World War II movies started, the US armed forces were made to appear integrated, though they actually weren't.  That is, there were separate black units, but not mixed races in the same unit.  Anyway, I was getting really uncomfortable at this point.

Another context is history.  The plot of the movie involved the battleship Alabama sailing to Hawaii in 1941.  There's even a Hawaiian number with the Andrews Sisters (and some background dancers who look like they might actually be Hawaiian, or at least Asian.) The movie came out in May.  In a surprise attack, Japanese war planes bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in December. By the time some audience members saw this film--not to mention me in 2019--this had already happened, with overriding and indelible images of burning ships, and heavy loss of life.  The US officially entered World War II the day after, on December 8.

Fortunately for the film, the Alabama was not one of the battleships sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor. (Those would be the Arizona, the Oklahoma, the California, the Pennsylvania, the Nevada, the Tennessee, the Maryland.)  In fact at that point there was no battleship Alabama in service--it would not be commissioned until 1942.  But still, it's impossible not to feel the weird dislocation of this movie.  In addition to preserving textures of the times, movies of this era tempt us into nostalgia for a lost home that never existed. But when that illusion is shattered, we learn something more.