Nonureva Really Surprised!

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

gkeith_1 Great. Great dancing and singing. Good to see all the actors. Good to see Ronald Reagan. Great comparison of two wars. People in first war had children in second. Great to see and hear Kate Smith.

bkoganbing Most of Irving Berlin's shows on Broadway were revues and not book type shows. For that reason they're not frequently revived. All of them contain topical jokes that only history majors like myself would get now. But the extreme topicality of This Is The Army and its World War I predecessor Yip Yap Yaphank guarantee you don't see this one revived too often no matter how many good songs come from it.Even to do This Is The Army we have a threadbare plot of sorts. George Murphy is a song and dance man doing the lead in the Ziegfeld Follies when he gets his draft notice for World War I. Like Irving Berlin in real life, he offers to put his entertainment talents at the army's disposal. Murphy also marries Rosemary DeCamp at the same time he goes in the army. Flash forward to a new World War and Murphy's son Ronald Reagan is going out with Joan Leslie who's the daughter of Charles Butterworth another performer from the Yip Yap Yaphank show back in the day. Reagan gets his draft notice just like dear old dad and he says let's put on a show for the boys. Of course dear old dad volunteers to help as do other veterans of the World War I show.One thing that Warner's was smart about, they didn't give Ronald Reagan any singing or dancing to do. Reagan's talents such as they are were confined to behind the curtain.A lot of Hollywood regulars are mixed with members of the original cast of actual soldiers who put on This Is The Army on Broadway. The score is also a mixed one with Irving Berlin allowing several of his older numbers mixed in with the Broadway score of This Is The Army. Most particularly God Bless America which Kate Smith had introduced in 1939 and sang in the film. It dwarfs all the other numbers in the score by comparison, in fact it's only rival in popularity in this film is Irving Berlin's soldier's lament of Oh How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning. And that originally comes from Yip Yap Yaphank. And of course that other barracks ballad telling what civilians will have to do without, the title song of the show and the film.This Is The Army is dated flag-waving to be sure, but as Irving Berlin said in another song in another show, do you know of a better flag to wave? Both Yip Yap Yaphank and This Is The Army are the product of an immigrant kid who escaped poverty and persecution in the old world of Europe. If Irving Berlin's life isn't the American success story than I don't know a better example. He was grateful to his adopted country and these shows were his way of payback.I doubt if B picture actor Ronald Reagan had the remotest conception that he would be sitting in the White House as a tenant one day and that he would be giving the nation's greeting to Irving Berlin on his 100th birthday. But that's an American success story too.

Neil Doyle What really enhanced my enjoyment of THIS IS THE ARMY last night on TCM is the fact that for once I saw a good, restored print of the wartime Warner Bros. musical and it looked great. The colors were vibrant. JOAN LESLIE never looked so beautiful with her reddish brown hair and the uniformly good cast of contract players headed by RONALD REAGAN, ALAN HALE, STANLEY RIDGES and others mixed well with the assorted real-life soldiers and sailors and marines who made up the bulk of the show. GEORGE MURPHY does a standout job as Reagan's show business father.The Irving Berlin tunes were the film's saving grace. His jaunty "This Is The Army, Mr. Jones," "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," and other sprightly numbers compensate for the very thin plot that has Reagan and Leslie as wartime sweethearts who don't get together until the final reel after quarreling foolishly about whether or not to tie the knot.Some of the comedy skits between soldiers are beyond corny and fall flat for today's audiences, but as hokey as most of it is, it's still an enjoyable show, especially the sight of beefy men in drag doing their thing with Berlin's irresistible songs. ALAN HALE is especially funny as an overweight soldier forced to take a female part in one of the show's big musical numbers.And, of course, the blackface routine may turn some politically correct spectators off the entire film.Trivia note: It's amusing to see Reagan get excited about the presence of the President of the United States in the audience--someone shown only in a distant shot. Reagan himself was about to occupy the White House for two straight terms at a future time. A rare and ironic moment!

goodmam As a twenty-year resident of Yaphank, New York, which is on Long Island about 60 miles east of Manhattan, I've learned some of the background of this movie.Irving Berlin wrote "Yip, Yip, Yaphank" while stationed at Camp Upton in Yaphank during WW I. (Camp Upton is now the Brookhaven National Laboratory.) For this show, which was indeed written to be performed by the soldiers, Berlin wrote "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning" and the melody of "God Bless America," which was actually cut from the show in its original form.The show even ran briefly on Broadway in 1918 with a Camp Upton cast, according to the Internet Broadway Data Base.After the war ended, the songs were put away, then brought out for the morale-boosting efforts of WW II. Berlin frequently rewrote and reused his songs; he revised the lyrics of "God Bless America" for Kate Smith and the rest, as they say, is history.