Hollywood Canteen **** (1944, Bette Davis, John Garfield, Joan Leslie, Robert Hutton, Dane Clark, The Andrews Sisters) – Classic Movie Review 3882

Writer-director Delmer Daves’s 1944 World War Two morale-boosting musical and toast to the real-life Hollywood Canteen vastly entertains with its high spirits, good humour, good intentions, and high-quota camp and nostalgia value.

As Bette Davis and John Garfield had helped to found the Hollywood Canteen for wartime troops, it was right and proper that their studio, Warner Bros, produced a musical of the same name and got the stars to play themselves.

It is appropriate, too, that the basic story, about two GIs, Corporal Slim Green and Sergeant Nowland (Robert Hutton and Dane Clark) on sick leave spending three nights at the canteen before going into action in New Guinea, is just an excuse for a stupendous show and tremendous parade of star names. With help from Garfield, Slim gets to kiss the real Joan Leslie, meets her at the Farmer’s Market and as the millionth man into the Canteen wins a date with her. And Sergeant Nowland gets to dance with Joan Crawford.

Made as an entertaining fundraiser with all profits going to war charities, it is hugely pleasurable for its nostalgia value today. The Canteen’s President Davis ends up celebrating both the Canteen and the war effort.

Among the hits: Cole Porter’s cowboy song ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ and Ted Koehler and Burton Lane’s ‘What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?’  ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ was Billboard number one single for eight weeks from December 23 1944 to February 10 1945.

Also in the cast are Joan Leslie, Janis Paige, Joan Crawford, Ida Lupino, Barbara Stanwyck, Eddie Cantor, Jack Carson, Eleanor Parker, Alexis Smith, S Z Sakall, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Roy Rogers, Jack Benny, Joseph Szigeti and the Andrews Sisters.

The Hollywood Canteen was the movie biz’s reply to Broadway’s Stage Door Canteen, immortalised in a 1943 film, Stage Door Canteen, with Cheryl Walker, William Terry and Judith Anderson, also written by Delmer Daves.

It is a film with enemies Davis and Crawford both in (before they finally played together in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? [1962]) and Lorre and Greenstreet, so it counts as one of their nine movies together.

When Crawford found out that Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck were also in the film she asked about the billing. On being told it was alphabetical, as C came before D or S, she agreed to do the film.

Other studios refused to join in the project and allow their performers to appear even though it was for for war effort charities, making Warner Bros look good. Ann Sheridan was to play Joan Leslie’s role as the female lead but she declined on the grounds that the script was too unrealistic, making her look bad.

Joan Leslie died on 12 October 2015, aged 90. She starred in more than 30 films – The Sky’s the Limit, Thank Your Lucky Stars, Rhapsody in Blue, This is the Army, Cinderella Jones, Hollywood Canteen and Repeat Performance. Her breakout role came at the age of 15, in High Sierra (1941) with Humphrey Bogart. Some of her most notable roles came before she was 18. She starred alongside Gary Cooper in Sergeant York (1941) and celebrated her 17th birthday on the set of Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) playing the wife of James Cagney.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3882
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