Product Description
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Warner Bros. and the Homefront Collection
HOLLYWOOD CANTEEN The Hollywood Canteen was a club for GIs where
Joan Crawford might over- easy you some eggs and John Garfield
might scrub out the frying pan. The movie Hollywood Canteen is a
snappy, starry salute to that World War II landmark. Dazzle the
troops and modern fans in “a great big scrambled vaudeville show
with enough talent to have made a dozen fine movies.” THANK YOUR
LUCKY STARS Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, and Dinah
Shore come out to play in the joyous World War II-era Thank Your
Lucky Stars. A breezy, behind-the-Hollywood-scenes story about
young talents hoping for a big break glitters with specialty
numbers featuring Golden Era greats. Dig in! THIS IS THE ARMY
From immigrant lad to All-American success story, Irving Berlin
showed his abiding love for his adopted country with, among other
cultural accomplishments, decades of Broadway hits, the
unofficial national anthem God Bless America and the World War II
spirit-lifter This Is the Army. On stage it featured 350
real-life GIs, giving their singing-and- dancing all to raise
nearly $2 million (then an astronomical sum) for Army Emergency
.
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"War is pretty grim business," an officer states in This is the
Army, one of three (literally) star-spangled World War II-era
musicals included in this rousing set. "Sometimes a song or a
smile is just as vital to an army as food." It was also essential
to those on the homefront, and Warner Bros. obliged with these
proudly patriotic extravaganzas in which the studios' A-list
talents sing, dance, poke fun at themselves, and most important,
offer their heartfelt support of the soldiers fighting overseas.
Boy, as the ads for That's Entertainment once procled, do we
need it now. "Wherever you go, our hearts go with you," Bette
Davis movingly states at the end of Hollywood Canteen (1944), a
salute to the famed club she co-founded where soldiers mingle
with the movies' best and brightest, who entertain and serve as
the wait staff. Robert Hutton stars as a wide-eyed soldier with a
mad crush on Joan Leslie. At the club, a "Reaganized" Jane Wyman
shows him the ropes, Barbara Stanwyck serves him food, and Paul
Henreid dispenses romantic advice to his lovelorn buddy, while
onstage the likes of Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, Roy Rogers and
Trigger, and others perform. Cantor gets the good sport medal for
Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943), in which he portrays himself as an
egomaniacal ham as well as an aspiring entertainer whose
resemblance to the real Cantor has stymied his career. The heart
of the film is a benefit show. If you've always wanted to see
Bette Davis or Errol Flynn sing and dance, then "That's What You
Jolly Well Get" (just one of the showstopping numbers). Great
comic character actors abound, including Edward Everett Horton
and chubby cheeked S.Z. Sakall, who, in one cute bit, intimidates
tough guy Humphrey Bogart. Michael Curtiz's This is the Army, the
top-grossing film of 1943, is a class act all the way, with an
O-winning score and great Irving Berlin tunes, including Kate
Smith's defining performance of "God Bless America" (Berlin
himself makes a rare screen appearance to sing, "Oh, How I Hate
to Get Up in the Morning"). George Murphy and Ronald Reagan front
the cast as her and son soldiers, who, in World Wars I and II,
respectively, morale-building stage shows. Each disc
replicates an old fashioned night at the movies, complete with
coming attraction, newsreel, vintage short subjects, and classic
cartoons. The This is the Army disc contains a 45-min.
documentary about Warner Bros.' war effort narrated by Steven
Spielberg, and delightful, all-too-brief commentary by Joan
Leslie, who is in all three films (the bulk of the detailed and
incisive commentary is by U.S.C. professor Dr. Drew Casper).
Whether as tribute to "the Greatest Generation" or as nostalgia
for vintage movie buffs, this collection is a (Yankee doodle)
dandy! --Donald Liebenson