Anchors Aweigh

Although Gene Kelly did not get top billing in 1945's Anchors Aweigh, it was the first of his films that made a deep impact on the history of dance in cinema--Kelly was credited as choreographer, and his balletic yet athletic, dare I say manly, style of dancing was on full display, even though his partner was a cartoon mouse.

Kelly co-starred with Frank Sinatra, then a singing sensation--it was only his third film--as sailors on leave in Hollywood (this would be repeated in On the Town, which saw the two in New York). Kelly plays Joe Brady, the "biggest wolf in the Navy," who is eager to hook with a good-time gal named Lola, while Sinatra plays Clarence Doolittle, an extremely shy lad from Brooklyn who wants Kelly's help in finding a girl to date.

The two end up involved with a young boy (Dean Stockwell), who wants to join the Navy despite being about eight-years-old, and his Aunt Susie (Kathryn Grayson), who Sinatra falls for. The sailors promise her an audition with conductor Jose Iturbi (playing himself) and scramble to try to make it come to fruition.

Anchors Aweigh, directed by George Sidney, is exactly what you would expect from a Technicolor picture made during the war. It's buoyant, occasionally serious (I got a lump in my throat at the end) and a bit bloated. At two hours and twenty minutes, it could have survived a few cuts here and there. But it's hard to get too down on the film, as it so eager to please, and you have to admire the effort.

Sinatra sings a few songs, and that's never a bad thing, as it is my opinion that he is the greatest American vocalist of all time. But the songs are largely forgettable. It is Kelly that steals the show, with a couple of dance numbers. The most famous of which is his duet with Jerry the mouse, which is part of a story that Kelly tells a group of children. Not only is the filming excellently done, but the vigorousness of his dancing is breathtaking. Later, he will dance with a young Mexican girl in a variation of the Mexican hat dance, and then, in another fantasy sequence, he adopts the guise of a Latin lover, swinging across parapets to the tune of "Fernando's Hideaway."

The film is also occasionally funny. I loved a scene with Grady Sutton (Og Oggibly from W.C. Fields' The Bank Dick) as an uptight fellow who is dissuaded from going out to dinner with Grayson by the boys making up a song about her lack of virtuousness. It reinforces how many of these films about servicemen from the era were not-so-subtly geared around their general horniness.