Three Cheers for the Girls

Tarnished Angel, which I blogged about a few days back, runs about 68 minutes, but TCM put it in a 90-minute block. Unsurprisingly, this means that they had time for a TCM Extra, a two-reeler titled Three Cheers for the Girls.

The short has a copyright date of 1943, and we're introduced to a dresser bringing in some costumes to a dressing room full of chorus girls. The girls then break into a song about how they're the Floradora Girls who appear in and make memorable all those musical numbers you may recall, even if you don't remember any of them in particular. (And looking at the credits on IMDb, I don't recognize the names of anybody in the framing story. We then get a cut to a musical number, with a bunch of chorus girls dancing and holding giant white flags that flutter thanks to a wind machine that's off-camera; the girls are dancing against a very black stage.

We go back and forth between musical numbers and the framing story, and I'm ashamed to admit it took me a few numbers to realize that these are all clips from previous Warner Bros. musicals. I think it's when they got to the one about Hawaii and I found myself wondering whether Flirtation Walk was a Warner Bros. musical or not. (It is, and is the movie from which that particular clip was taken.)

The last number was obviously Dick Powell, in a movie called The Singing Marine, which was followed by some footage of actual fighting Marines, or at least Marines in training, as I'm not certain whether Hollywood cameras would have gotten that close to the Marines in actual war. You have to remember that this short was released in 1943, which was at the height of World War II, so audiences probably wanted the morale boost of seeing the brave marines.

Warner Bros. probably also thought that audiences might go for something nostalgic, and what cheaper way to do that than to repackage some musical numbers from old movies? It doesn't hurt that these are all supposed to be feel-good numbers, too. Eighty years on, it's tough to say that this short still works. If you're not the biggest fan of musicals, then you probably won't remember the movies used. Even though I've seen a couple of the movies from which the clips are taken, these are lesser Warner Bros. musicals, never mind that Warner Bros. didn't have as good musicals as MGM.

It wouldn't surprise me, however, if audiences of the day did have a better memory of some of these movies, as the movies would have been less than a decade old. They certainly would still have had a fresh memory of Dick Powell, who had recently left Warner Bros. although he was still a year away from turning his career around with Murder, My Sweet. So I'm sure there are people who will enjoy this more than I did.