Advance to the Rear

Among the movies I recorded during Glenn Ford's turn as Star of the Month back in July was Advance to the Rear. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so now you get your review of the movie here.

Glenn Ford plays Capt. Heath, who's serving on an obscure front of the Civil War for the North, under Col. Brackenbury (Melvyn Douglas). It's obscure enough that it doesn't seem to matter who wins. Each side shoots 30 rounds of artillery at a set time each morning, and that's it for the day. No trying to take land or anything like that. That is, until Heath shows some initiative, and on a patrol actually captures a couple of Confederate soldiers. Brackenbury is ticked, because he knows this means the other side will retaliate.

Sure enough, the Confederate commander does, more or less routing the Union. It leads to an inquiry to figure out what went wrong. When General Willoughby (Jim Backus), who is put in charge of the inquiry, finds out what's been going on, boy is he angry. Something has to be done to make certain these soldiers can't do anything to screw up the war effort. So a plan is hatched to find all of the most incompetent soldiers and transfer them into one company under Brackenbury and Heath, with the intention to send that company to an isolated outpost out west where they'll basically sit out the war.

Meanwhile, the Confederates learn what's happening, so they send a spy, the lovely Martha Lou (Stella Stevens) onto the riverboat the Union company is taking (presumably up either the Missouri or Mississippi) and figure out what they're up to. With a little help from madame Easy Jenny (Joan Blondell), it's determined that Martha Lou's back story is a fraud. But she's so good looking that Heath plans to woo her as if that's going to keep her from her mission. Not that there should be much of a mission of course since the company is being kept out of action.

Except that a snafu happens. When the company arrives at their destination, there's another company there that thinks it's getting relieved. And that other company was part of orders to guard a shipment of Union gold, so now it's up to our company of incompetents to do the guarding. The Confederates might be able to score a victory in at least one part of the war after all.

Advance to the Rear is a fairly light comedy, and I saw reading the IMDb reviews that I wasn't the first person to think of the sitcom F Troop, which came out a few years later than this movie. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking with the movie, but it's a pleasant enough way to spend 100 minutes, and everybody looks as though they were enjoying themselves making the movie. Ford was better at comedy than his list of movies might have you think, and Douglas takes his role and runs with it for all it's worth.

If you want a movie you can just sit back with a bowl of popcorn and have fun watching, rather than a "prestige" movie, you could do far worse than Advance to the Rear.