Another of the movies that was on my DVR that I recently watched was Two Girls and a Sailor. Having been produced by MGM, it's unsurprisingly made its way to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.
The Deyo sisters -- Patsy (June Allyson) and Jean (Gloria DeHaven) -- are sisters born of vaudeville parents. They've grown up and their parents have died, so they decide to start a double act of their own, singing and dancing. Of course, vaudeville as their parents would have known it had more or less died by this point, but there's still a war on and soldiers and sailors to be entertained. The Deyos would like to open a canteen for the men going off to war, but of course, that takes money they don't have.
You just know somebody with money is going to come into their lives, and you can probably guess right away who that person is. An anonymous benefactor the sisters refer to as "Somebody" sends a lawyer their way to let them know they own the building next to their apartment, a heretofore vacant building that they can refurbish and turn into that canteen. The two sisters try to figure out who their benefactor can be, while dealing with romantic involvments from the servicemen.
John Brown (Van Johnson), about to go back and fight more with the Navy, is one of those servicemen. Patsy is really in love with him and Jean certainly likes him, with John first choosing Jean. It turns out, however, that Jean meets another serviceman, soldier Frank Miller (Tom Drake), and she could see herself with him, except that she doesn't want to hurt poor John. John realizes that he really prefers Patsy, but again, he doesn't want to hurt Jean, and this causes a whole lot of heartache for Patsy before we get to the big finale where the right couples wind up with each other.
Two Girls and a Sailor was released in the middle of 1944, so don't expect an original plot here. Instead, it was designed for the morale of the people on the homefront, combining a Hallmark Channel-type story with a whole bunch of musical acts, the latter being what people would have gone to see above the story. Indeed, there are a lot of people who get more or less their own title card, appearing as themselves. There's José Iturbi and his lesser-known sister doing a two-piano piece; Harry James leading an orchestra; Lean Horne singing; and Gracie Allen, without George Burns, making life a nightmare for José Iturbi and Xavier Cugat. She plays a piano number with one finger, over the objections of the two men, reminding them, "Don't you know there's a war on?"
One person not playing himself is Jimmy Durante, as a fellow vaudevillean whose wife walked out on him ages ago, leaving him to quit the business and live as a squatter in the building that the Deyos convert into the canteen. When everybody finds out who he is, he's going to be cajoled into coming out of retirement....
As I said, the plot is nothing to write home about. The musical numbers, however, are, at least for the sort of people who like movies of the 1940s and are interested in the sort of movies Hollywood was making during World War II to try to brighten everybody's day. People not into that sort of thing are probably not going to enjoy the movie all that much, other than as a sort of museum piece.
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