Thousands Cheer

Red Skelton was TCM's Star of the Month back in April. One of his movies that I had on my DVR surprisingly enough was not shown as part of the tribute. But since the movie would be kinda-sorta appropriate for Memorial Day weekend (not that TCM is programming it), and because the movie is going to expire from my DVR relatively soon, I figure that now is a good time to blog about it. That movie is Thousands Cheer.

The opening credits of the movie announce that it's introducing José Iturbi, a Brazilian pianist/conductor who would appear in several muscially inclined movies over the next several years, and he's in the opening, leading a philharmonic concert where one of the performers is singer Kathryn Jones (Kathryn Grayson). After her musical number, she informs the audience that she's going to be taking a sabbatical from performing: her father Bill (John Boles) is a US Army colonel, and with the movie being made in 1943, it's smack-dab in the middle of World War II. Col. Jones is about to be assigned to another base, and Kathryn is going to follow him in order to provide morale for the troops stationed there about to go off to war.

One of those troops is Pvt. Eddy Marsh (Gene Kelly), who is on the same train to the base as Col. Boles. He implies to Kathryn that he loves her, not realizing that she too is going to be staying at the base, which is going to make things awkward when the two of them meet again. They do meet again on the base, and Eddy informs Kathryn that he doesn't really like the army. He was drafted, but he came from a family of circus aerialists, with the result that he feels much more comfortable up in the air than on the ground and as a result would really prefer to be transferred to the Air Corps.

Kathryn falls in love with Eddy along the way, although Eddy has a problem with the officer corps which means that by definition he also has a problem with the daughter of an officer. Additionally, Kathryn's mother Hyllary (Mary Astor) doesn't want her daughter marrying a soldier. Hyllary did so and suffered heartbreak thanks to her husband's transfers and basically being married to the military. Besides, Eddy's attitude is so bad that one wonders whether he's going to be court-martialed out of the military.

All of that occurs in the amount of running time that a movie might have if Thousands Cheer were a B movie. But it isn't, being one of MGM's big, morale-boosting films for the war effort. As such, Kathryn has to invite all her friends to help put on that big show for the soldiers about to go off to war. Mickey Rooney (playing himself) is the MC of that show, and he's brought his MGM friends (again playing themselves) to perform skits and musical numbers at the camp for the soldiers. This show-within-a-show takes the final third of the movie, with a coda at the end to resolve the main story. Quite a few of MGM's stars perform, including Skelton.

Thousands Cheer is an odd little -- or should I say big, since it runs a bit over two hours -- movie, since it's really two movies in one. Gene Kelly was fairly early in his career, but already shows his ability. However, he wasn't given a particularly interesting story in which to show that ability. It's not Kelly's fault, of course; the movie has to hit the propaganda notes of a serviceman redeeming himself by doing the right thing for his country, and it has to do that fairly briefly since we've got 45 minutes of MGM cameos to show, thank you very much.

Some of the cameos are better than others, with Frank Morgan being irritating while some of the singers do reasonably well. The aerialists might be the highlight of the camp show. That, and Mickey Rooney doing his impressions of some of his fellow MGM contract players. Not that they're notably good, but they're certainly fun. Interestingly, there's a conceit where one of the soldiers in the crowd, played by Ben Blue, goes googly-eyed over all the female singers. Except when Lena Horne shows up, but then again Horne's segment has obvious points where censors in the South could have cut so those sensitive southern moviegoers wouldn't have to see a black woman singing.

For me, Thousands Cheer comes across 80-plus years on as more of a time capsule than anything else, but it's one you may want to check out.