Uncle Sam's Trigger Finger

      A year after he made one of film history's most famous and beloved films, Casablanca, Michael Curtiz directed a rip-roaring pro-military propaganda extravaganza, This Is the Army (1943).  While the former film's pro-Allies propaganda weaves seamlessly through the narrative, with accompanying ambiguities represented by Humphrey Bogart's doubt-ridden character, as a story of resistance to Nazi aggression, the latter film's propaganda hammer-blows the viewer in the ears and eyes, leaving no doubt where the film studio (Warner Brothers), working in cooperation with the federal government, stands on the subject of U.S. Army recruitment and the necessity of "getting the job done," or, as one mother says to her son, "Go get em!"

     Meaning: Kill the "Japs," kill the Germans.

     Irving Berlin, composer of the World War One era version of this stage show become a film, had written in the climactic sequence the lyric:

     

     Dressed up to kill

     We're dressed up to kill

     Dressed up for victory

     Oh, we don't like killing

     But we won't stop killing

     Till the world is free

     According to an interesting TCM website article on the film, "...public attacks from religious groups decrying the bloodthirstiness of these lines prompted Jack Warner and Irving Berlin to bow to pressure and change the words.  Berlin changed 'kill' to 'win' and adjusted the middle lines to: 'We are just beginning/And we won't stop winning.'"

     The movie begins with America's entry into the First World War.  We meet the main characters, the older generation of soldiers, including, most prominently, Jerry Jones (George Murphy), Maxie Twardofsky (George Tobias), Sergeant McGee (Alan Hale), and Eddie Dibble (Charles Butterworth).  None of these people, along with everyone else in the film, bear any resemblance to believable human beings.  They look like people, are played by people, but there's nothing real under their surfaces; in other words, props in a propaganda film.

     Once in boot camp, they complain about having to get up at 5:30.  They gripe about the bugler, Eddie Dibble.  Irving Berlin himself, in the World War Two stage version (an actual touring show from the period, so the movie is based on "real events"), sings a song about how he'd like "to murder the bugler."

I guess he won't stop killing that bugler until he's free of that bugler.

     Alan Hale's Sergeant McGee is a bluff-hearty Alan Hale type, a lifer who shows up in the film's second part, dealing with World War Two.  In keeping with the film's lack of character depth, he's exactly the same two and a half decades after the first war.  One comic-minded soldier can't get his marching right.  McGee says, "How did you get here?"

     "Politics," the recruit replies, uttering the film's only subversive line.  

     This film and the show it was based upon were very popular during World War Two.  Berlin traveled with it for three years, performing on stage his anti-bugler song, looking way too old to be a combat infantryman, but that doesn't matter in a film featuring a minstrel show with white soldiers in Black face, male soldiers dressed up as women in two of the dance and song numbers.  Alan Hale as a woman is the opposite of erotic.

     Children of the original generation pop up in the World War Two section, prominent among them Corporal Jones, son of Jerry Jones.  The Corporal, played by Ronald Reagan, on three occasions, tells his luscious girlfriend, Eileen Dibble (Joan Leslie), daughter of the bugler, he can't marry her until the war's over.  He's just too uncertain; he's afraid she'll get married to him and then lose him as a war casualty.  A possibility, definitely, but Eileen's an insistent gal.  She joins the Red Cross, convinces him to marry--there just happens to be a minister nearby--during intermission in the show's last performance in Washington, D.C., (with FDR in the balcony!).  Since the unit is shipping out that night I guess they can only consummate the marriage with a quickie backstage but that isn't dealt with.  

     Ronald Reagan brings me to George Murphy.  Reagan once referred to Murphy as "John the Baptist."  Why?  Murphy, as Republican Senator George Murphy from California (1965-1971), was the first movie actor to become a national level politician, with Reagan following as Governor of California in 1966.  By making reference to the Baptist, Reagan was implying, jokingly I suspect, that he, Ronald, was Christ.  

     Murphy was a capable enough actor but his real performative skill lay in dancing.  For some reason, the script calls for Jerry Jones, a Broadway hoofer at the beginning of the film, to get trapped under rubble in France, suffering a leg injury preventing him from dancing, except at the end, when, standing by Irving Berlin, he does a few steps to the delight of the crowd watching the miraculous cripple who helped foist this maudlin and bloodthirsty show on unquestioning audiences who, in 1943, didn't see it the way I did in 2020.  

     In those days, wars didn't last two decades, as the one we're currently enduring has done.

  

     But we won't stop killing

     Till the world is free

     Actually, killing makes the world less free.  

     In the film, the theater audience at the command performance for FDR watches 300 uniformed American soldiers on a tiered platform, backgrounded by a huge plaster eagle and Uncle Sam head plus finger, thrusting their bayonetted rifles at the audience, singing about "winning," the word replacing "killing."  Their guns aim right at the audience; somehow, this is normal.

     George Murphy in 1964 said of Mexicans working in American fields, "You have to remember that Americans can't do that kind of work.  It's too hard.  Mexicans are really good at that.  They are built low to the ground, you see, so it is easier for them to stoop."

     By the same argument, the young children of rich White people are also "built low to the ground," and should therefore be able to work those jobs.  

     Still, Senator Murphy did vote for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.  He voted to confirm Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court.  This goes to show that Republican politicians in the 1960s were more open-minded than they are now.  

     I couldn't help thinking that Michael Curtiz might've been bored out of his mind working with such shallow material.  The distance in time and feeling, however, seventy-seven years from then till now, mars my appreciation for an entertainment that must've favorably diverted the attentions of civilians and military personnel, although watching big Alan Hale in a dress and blonde curly wig is a meme no longer translatable to modern audiences.

Vic Neptune