A million tanks

James Gleason was an always reliable character actor, and it was nice to see him get a day in the 2025 Summer Under the Stars on TCM. One of his movies that I hadn't seen before was the Hal Roach Streamliner Tanks a Million, so I recorded it in order to be able to do the post on it here.

A search of the blog says I haven't mentioned the Streamliners before. These were a series of movies Hal Roach produced that were longer than the shorts he had mostly been producing, but still shorter than even a lot of the B movies, clocking in mostly at a shade under an hour (this one is 50 minutes). Granted, this was still the era before TV so in later years material like this would probably have been storyboarded for episodic TV. The "star", if you will, here is William Tracy, playing Dorian "Dodo" Doubleday. As the movie opens, he's on a radio show where he's showing off his photographic memory. Dodo works at a train station information booth, but that work is coming to an end as he's just been drafted into the army. (The movie was released in September 1941, so no mention of any possible upcoming war.)

Sgt. Ames (Joe Sawyer) is the drill instructor assigned to the new recruits, but Pvt. Doubleday already knows the entire army manual and not only that, but seems to know how to actually do the stuff the manual asks of new recruits. And he's frankly obnoxious about showing off all this knowledge. Needless to say, it ticks Sgt. Ames off, but when Ames goes to his superior officers, they get the brilliant idea to promote Doubleday to sergeant, albeit with a bit of a devious catch. Doubleday is assigned to a unit that has the most inept recruits, who also have a bit of a mischievous streak in that they figure out ways to do stuff very close to sergeant's orders. If Sgt. Doubleday fails to mention every article of clothing they're supposed to wear, they'll only wear the ones he mentioned. The trick's on them, however, when they have to march barefoot.

Col. Barkley (James Gleason) is coming to the base, where he's supposed to deliver a speech that's going out on a national radio hookup. Not that he likes giving radio speeches. Sgt. Doubleday gets assigned to be Barkley's orderly. But when he gets some sort of powder on Barkley's uniform, he puts the jacket on himself to be able to clean the powder off. Unfortunately, this leads to his being mistaken for Barkley, leading to all sorts of complications. But since this is a comedy, and a short one at that, you know things are going to work out well, and quickly.

Tanks a Million is a film that's rather more episode than something that has a fully-fledged plot, although that's probably to be expected coming from Hal Roach since he'd been doing a lot more with shorts. The material is adequate for what it is, which is a throaway B movie. Nobody will consider Tanks a Million any great shakes, but back in 1941 I'd bet it entertained while it came and went, to be promptly forgotten as it was replaced by the next movie.