#81 - Star Spangled Rhythm

So, here we have the second movie from a Bob Hope Classics DVD. If you you read the My Favorite Blonde review(It's #80...you should be able to find it), you know that I enjoy watching Bob Hope perform and the idea of seeing more was a good one to me. So...when was he going to show up? Seriously, I was watching this movie under the assumption that I was going to see Bob Hope, yet he was nowhere to be found. I thought to myself, "What the hell is going on here?" How do you have a movie in a Bob Hope tribute DVD...AND NOT HAVE HIM IN IT!?!?!? Well, the answer is simple. It's not really a Bob Hope movie. In fact, it's something altogether different. But he does show up, so I guess it counts. Lets put To Kill A Mockingbird in the Robert Duvall collection. Let's put Father's Day in the Mel Gibson collection. Let's put Home Alone in the John Candy collection. Let's put Arachnaphobia in the John Goodman collection. Get my point?

What we have here is a veritable who's who of Paramount Studios from back in the day when actors, directors, and writers were contracted to individual studios. Mary Martin. Dick Powell. Alan Ladd. Dorothy Lamour. Veronika Lake. Fred MacMurray. Hope and Crosby. Preston Sturges. Cecil B. Demille. And there are tons more. How could they possibly cram all of these stars into one movie? Well, all you need is a paper thin storyline about a young man in the military on shore leave visiting his father who works at the Paramount lot. I could go into details about the story, but there really is no point because that's not what this movie is about. As I was watching this movie, I felt as though I was in the middle of a two hour advertisement for Paramount Studios. Cameos galore, numerous styles of musicals numbers that are placed into the film in various contrived ways, and a number of different comedy scenes and routines that are also placed in the film in their own special ways. It's weird. I didn't like the premise cause it seemed so obvious what they were doing, but the scenes and numbers were very well written and well done and fun to watch. Upon a teeny bit of poking around, I found that this was Paramounts first effort to make a film for soldiers fighting in the war. Given that, I can't frown on this film because it does what it was intended to do. I just wish it was a more complete movie, like National Velvet.

You know what I like about some of these older movies that have show within a show type performances? I like it when the shows are supposedly thrown together at the last minute, and then the production value is absolutely top notch. Huge sets, special effects, the whole shebang, and thrown together overnight. I understand that I am bringing up something unimportant to the point of the movie, and honestly, I hate people who bring up these kinds of points as a negative aspect for a film. You know those people. The kind of people who complain about weak character development in summer blockbusters. The kind of people who complain about editing continuity errors. Sometimes, and I do mean sometimes, these things don't really matter. In the case of this movie, I happen to find it amusing, mostly because I'm in the entertainment business and I know that putting something like that together takes MONTHS of planning and WEEKS of preparation.

Do you ever get the feeling that sometimes I am not writing a review and instead I am rambling on about random topics related to movies that only sort of relate to the movie I watched and therefore I end up not saying much about the movie at all? Yeah, me too.