For the Boys

Strike up the band…

Big star showcases were a staple of the World War Two era, and one of them was 1943’s Thousands Cheer. MGM’s trade paper, The Lion’s Roar, declared, “On all the Broadways of America, there’s a milling to get into the most extravagant extravaganza in years entitled “Thousands Cheer”.”

On one hand, Lion’s hyperbole is pretty thick, but on the other hand it’s hard to argue with, because from a star standpoint, it’s huge.

The movie opens with Kathryn Jones (Kathryn Grayson) giving a concert with Jose Iturbi. She’s a big hit, everyone loves her, but there’s a war on, and she’s going with her dad, Colonel Bill Jones (John Boles) when he moves to a new camp. Kathryn’s mom, Hyllary (Mary Astor) is also in the audience, and she’s both proud and apprehensive because she and Bill separated a long time ago and have been pretty estranged ever since.

Come train time, and the station is a flurry of soldiers saying goodbye to their wives and girlfriends. Kathryn wrangles a last conversation for her parents on the pretext of asking her mother to buy her Popular Mechanics at the newsstand, and then she stands awkwardly by watching everyone else say goodbye. It just so happens that Private Eddie Marsh (Gene Kelly) is also standing awkwardly by watching the scene, and much to Kathryn’s shock, he gives her a kiss. Eddie is equally shocked when he finds Kathryn on the train with him.

Kathryn throws herself into entertaining the troops at the camp, and naturally she’s hugely popular. Eddie is one of the many giving her the eye, but his motives aren’t exactly altruistic: He doesn’t like the Army and wants to transfer to the Air Force, so his way of making that happen is buttering up the C.O.’s daughter.

What Eddie doesn’t expect, though, is to fall in love, and it all happens one night when he takes Kathryn to the circus to meet his adoptive family, all of whom are aerialists. Eddie used to be up there with them, and that’s where he feels the most comfortable, which is why he wants to be in the Air Force. After meeting Kathryn, however, he pumps the brakes on that idea, although he has to get on Bill’s good side first.

As it turns out, there’s plenty to do at camp. Kathryn invites Jose up to the camp to put on a show in two weeks, and Eddie is going to help. Well, at least he does until he leaves rehearsal when he isn’t supposed to and lands in the brig. Hyllary has also shown up out of the blue, because she’s not too happy that Kathryn has fallen for a soldier and she doesn’t want her daughter to go through what she’s gone through.

Meanwhile, there’s a show to get on, and it comes together remarkably quickly for something that only takes a week or so to mount. Eddie’s family are even doing a number along with Eddie because Bill thinks Eddie has forgotten how to be a team player and needs a refresher.

The show, though. Oh, the show. It’s chockablock with MGM stars and other luminaries of the wartime period. Eleanor Powell tap dances. Kay Kyser and his orchestra give out. Lena Horne, June Allyson, Gloria DeHaven, Judy Garland and Virginia O’Brien sing. There’s a skit starring Frank Morgan, Lucille Ball and Ann Sothern. There’s another skit featuring Red Skelton playing a soda jerk. Mickey Rooney emcees and does his famous Clark Gable and Lionel Barrymore impressions. All told, the show takes up about half the movie’s running time.

Oh, it’s primo stuff. It’s definitely Kathryn Grayson’s movie, as she carries the lion’s share of the songs, and MGM really fired on all cylinders as far as support went.

The only one who really doesn’t have much to do is Gene Kelly, who dances with a mop in one scene and none of his fellow soldiers remark on it in any way even though it’s fantastic. During the aerialist scenes, we only see him in close-up, with the hard stuff performed by a pretty obvious stuntman. Kelly was a phenom, but he wasn’t that good. It’s also interesting that he was playing another slightly unsympathetic character so soon after For Me And My Gal, but unlike his character in that film, Kelly’s Eddie didn’t resort to doing anything stupid or drastic to get what he wanted.

The movie was a massive success, bringing in about eleven million dollars in 1943 currency, and the reviews were glowing or at least complementary, although critics couldn’t help but notice how much the musical numbers fractured the the film’s minimal plot. Showman’s Trade Review opined, “While the two halves are distant cousins and give the impression of two pictures, each has excellent entertainment qualities.”

Photoplay agreed: “It’s not that we don’t enjoy the work of the above-mentioned stars, but that the affaire de coeur beween Kathryn and Gene is so tenderly fascinating we want to carry along with them to the very finish.”

Motion Picture Herald said,

This is a showmen’s picture, brimming with marquee names, songs that will be popular favorites, bands that already are, comedy to suit all tastes and bearing but small relation to wartime problems, although the screen is filled with well-cut khaki…For sophisticated tastes, it offers the superb skill of Jose Iturbi, as conductor, soloist and boogie-woogie artist, revealing, incidentally, an attractive screen personality. With these, and two brief but thrilling glimpses of an aerial trapeze act, it cannot fail to satisfy all the customers at least part of the time. (Motion Picture Herald, September 18, 1943)

None of them are wrong, but none of them say the plot is especially innovative, either. It’s nice enough, but it mostly serves to get us to the giant camp show, and that’s fine. Honestly, the best thing I can say about Thousands Cheer is, and this is definitely not a slam: “Come for the musical numbers and stay for the musical numbers, because the plot is the delivery system.”

For more musical love, please see Rachel at Hamlette’s Soliloquy. Thanks for hosting this, Rachel–it was a blast! Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you on Tuesday for our latest “During World War Two” post…

---

Thousands Cheer is available on DVD from Amazon.

~Purchases made via Amazon Affiliate links found on this site help support Taking Up Room at no extra cost to you.~

If you’re enjoying what you see on Taking Up Room, please subscribe to my Substack page, where you’ll find both free and paid subscriber-only reviews of mostly new and newish movies, documentaries, and shows. I publish every Wednesday and Saturday. You can also subscribe to my Club 15 Tier, which gives you at least one extra Taking Up Room post every month for a small fee.