Some months back TCM had a spotlight on child stars a couple of months back, which gave them a chance to highlight Dean Stockwell's appearance in Anchors Aweigh. Never having done a post on it before, I decided to DVR it so I could watch and do a post on it.
Stockwell, of course, is not the star, although his character is a key driver of the plot. The stars are Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. They play Joe and Clarene respectively, a couple of guys who have become best friends while in the navy in World War II; indeed, Joe even saved Clarence's life, so, after a musical number with MGM's bandleader José Iturbi (playing himself), Joe and Clarence get four days' shore leave.
Joe plans to go up to Los Angeles to see his girlfriend Lola (although we never meet her), while Clarence tags along hoping for some advice on how to deal with girls because he's really quite shy. But first they meet little Dean Stockwell, who's clearly not a girl and clearly too young to be romanced. Instead, he's Donald Martin, a young boy who wants to join the Navy to do his part for the war effort, his parents apparently having died. His home is now with his aunt Susan (Kathryn Grayson).
As you can guess, Susan is going to become the romantic lead. She works sometimes as a film extra, and in the evenings as a singer at a local Mexican-themed restaurant/nightclub. But her real dream is to be a singer in the movies, and if she can just get an audition with José Iturbi, she knows she'll be a big hit. Joe claims that Clarence will be able to get Susan that audition, and much of the movie deals with Joe and Clarence trying to meet Iturbi to get that audition for her.
The second part of the movie has to do with the various romantic entanglements. Clarence falls in love with Susan, but then at the restaurant where she sings she meets he meets a waitress who, like Clarence, is also from Brooklyn (Pamela Britton), hence the nickname Brooklyn. Clarence falls in love with her, which is going to make breaking off the relationship with Susan tough. Except that by this time, Joe has fallen in love with Susan, and he's worried about how to let Clarence know that he's going to lose Susan to Joe.
The third main theme of the movie is the musical numbers that have little to do with the plot. The most famous of these is the highlight of the movie, a scene in which Gene Kelly dances with Jerry, MGM's cartoon mouse. The framing for this is Joe telling little Donald and his classmates a story about a joyless king (Jerry) who has banned dancing in the kingdom, and how Joe taught Jerry to love dancing. In fact, of course, the scene has little to do with the rest of the plot of the movie.
And if there's a problem with the movie, it's the massive number of song and dance numbers that bloat the movie's running time to 140 minutes. Sure, we go to a Gene Kelly movie to see him dance, and go to a Frank Sinatra movie to see him sing. But there's so much of both here that it keeps bringing the movie to a halt. The plot is also little more than serviceable, so serviceable in fact that it's been used in service of lots of movies. Plotwise, there's nothing original here.
That's not to say I wouldn't recommend the movie. It's more that I would recommend other things first; Singin' in the Rain for example has a top-notch plot with most of the musical numbers fitting in reasonably well. Add in Sinatra and On the Town is better, and shorter. People who like Gene Kelly and/or Sinatra, however, will definitely love Anchors Aweigh.
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