SmugKitZine Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

AboveDeepBuggy Some things I liked some I did not.

ReaderKenka Let's be realistic.

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

jjnxn-1 Great music and a lightweight story add up to a pleasant diversion. The professional actors like Ann Rutherford, Carole Landis and Cesar Romero all give enjoyable performances. Also a great movie for familiar faces that were just starting out like Jackie Gleason and Harry Morgan to pop in and disappear. Marion Hutton, Betty's sister, shows up as one of the band's singers and the resemblance is striking. As for Glenn Miller, as an actor he was a wonderful band leader and Tex Beneke who plays one of the husbands had a beautiful voice and a face just made for radio. None of it really matters at all though whenever the boys pick up their instruments and play it's magic.

mark.waltz An innocent young bride (Ann Rutherford) gets even with the catty wives of Glenn Miller's band members when they use her naiveté to cause trouble in her marriage to handsome George Montgomery. "It it's one thing I hate, it's a leaky dame", one of the other wives says about her blubbering bride. "Hello, Room Service? Come on up, I've got a lot of dirty dishes", Rutherford retorts after pulling a Norma Shearer (in "The Women") and causing a cat fight among two of the women who have just destroyed a service cart. All this and the best music Glenn Miller didn't play in "Sun Valley Serenade".That recent Beyonce hit ("At Last", also recorded by Etta James) was introduced here, which makes this a historical must for modern music lovers. "I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo" was the other big song. Fresh from the Andy Hardy series and her most famous role (as Scarlett O'Hara's younger sister in "Gone With the Wind"), Rutherford is excellent, going from that leaky dame to fellow cat, joining Lynn Bari, Carole Landis and Virginia Gilmore in the art of classic movie bitchery. Grant Mitchell (as Rutherford's father), Cesar Romero, Jackie Gleason and Harry Morgan are among the familiar faces who round out the supporting cast. Morgan (playing a soda jerk) has a memorable sequence where he escorts Rutherford to a concert but is aghast when he finds her with Montgomery and threatens to beat up the much larger man.There is an amusing moment between Mitchell and George Montgomery where Montgomery, not realizing that Mitchell is his father-in-law, calls him "older than Metheselah". (I always wondered where that quote originated!) Usually, the plots in musicals are rather flaccid, but this one is much better than normal. The music simply enhances it, and when the Nicholas Brothers come on to dance, it explodes into red-hot rhythm with the war a quiet backdrop for the moving of the band on the road. Life must go on, it is observed, even in wartime. This makes for perhaps one of the best big band musicals filled with sizzling music, wonderful wisecracks, plenty of female bickering and tons of fun!

musica1 I had never heard of this movie, but I just came across it on a movie channel on TV. Wow! I was in 7th heaven with all the wonderful music! I've always been curious about the big band era and have listened to quite a few of the bands (or orchestras, as they were apparently called back then), and the sweetest sound by far comes from The Glenn Miller Orchestra. This movie has the actual Glenn Miller Orchestra and Glenn Miller himself playing the band. The interaction among the wives is interesting in that it seems that at least that part of life hasn't changed. Women were always their own worst enemies and still are. You can see updated versions of the back-biting and gossiping in the current (2011) reality shows on TV. And the parts of the movie set in Connie's home town show a glimpse into 1942 small-town America.This movie is well worth watching for the amazing music.

writers_reign Hindsight is okay but we should keep an eye on it. For example hindsight allows us to speculate that Fox, having signed Glenn Miller and his orchestra to a two-picture deal and despite the fact that the band was arguably the best-known and most popular in the country, decided that for their first At Bat the band needed the support of a 'speciality' act, cue Sonja Henie, ex-Olympic swimmer and already a veteran of such Fox musicals as Second Fiddle. Hindsight then tells us that this first movie, Sun Valley Serenade, let the Fox moguls know that the Miller outfit was a top draw in itself thus this second movie relies only on a Redbook magazine storyline, the Miller ork and some great numbers by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon. So it is that Ann Rutherford, late of the Andy Hardy movies and Gone With The Wind, marries trumpeter George Montgomery on the strength of two brief meetings and thus becomes the newest 'orchestra wife' learning about life - and love - on the road. It's more predictable than Old Moore's Almanac but the nostalgia quotient - Jackie Gleason, Marion Hutton, Ray Eberle plus THAT band - is almost off the chart, add such dazzling numbers as At Last, Serenade In Blue, People Like You And Me and I Got A Gal In Kalamazoo and we're looking at an unbeatable parlay. One to savour.