Simon jigs and jives to the STAR SPANGLED RHYTHM on DVD - Bing Crosby reviewed on OWF!

I love musicals. The bigger the better. And sometimes a release like this happens when I'm able to rediscover one that has slipped my mind and fall in love with it again.

There are a few proper stars who I have enormous admiration for from the Golden Years of Hollywood- there are a number of actors who had played significant roles in the generation of my passion for film, and the three who had the greatest effect when I was younger and far less critically minded were James Stewart, John Wayne and Bing Crosby.

Each has an attached different and very personal reason for their affectiveness, and I will freely offer here that Crosby represented a substantial link to my mother, whose favourite film remains to this day to be High Society. Crosby, along with Fred Astaire, seemed to me to represent something so alien from modern culture, and yet he was able to leave the most lasting of imprints upon it (which can be the only explanation for his curious teaming-up with David Bowie one Christmas).

And it was films like Star Spangled Rhythm that epitomised most the other-worldliness that I had grown to attach to Crosby's work. The film has finally got the DVD treatment in the U.K. this week...

But of course, the film isnt Crosby's project- he is merely a bit-part, appearing as himself in one memorable and enormously propoganda-laden scenes at the very end of the movie. So to have the film listed as a Bing Crosby/Bob Hope headlined project is somewhat of a misdirection, though both of their inclusions are more than welcome additions to the enormous, star spangled cast.

That cast-list reads unbelievably well, with appearances from everyone from Eva Gabor, Dick Powell, Veronika Lake and Alan Ladd, to the higher billed duet of Bing Crosby himself and the ever-entertaining Bob Hope, but none of the star-names are the stars in terms of the film itself. That prestigious honour falls to Victor Moore who plays William 'Bronco Bill' Webster, Eddie Bracken who plays his sailor son Johnny, and Betty Hutton who plays female lead Polly Judson- the three chief players holding the rather suspiciously tenuous plot together so the rest of the entertainment can flourish. Basically, Moore, a former Paramount star who now works as a security guard at Paramount has told his son- who is a sailor (hence the military link) that he's the head of the studio to hide his fail from grace. When his son arrives in Hollywood on shore leave with some buddies, his father enlists the aid of the studio's dizzy switchboard operator (Hutton) in trying to pull off the charade. Things are complicated further when William agrees to put together a show for the Navy starring Paramount's top contract players, but wouldnt you know it all turns out rosey again.

There isnt exactly what you'd call a great deal of narrative friction, but that's not what the film is about, with the plot very much playing a secondary role to the music and comedy routines, and for once, I'm happy of the lack of narrative complexity.

Star Spangled Rhythm also holds the somewhat mixed honour of being the first movie that was produced as a direct result of the government's request for Hollywood to quickly release some high-energy, feel-good movies for national pride and general morale-boosting reasons in the wake of the US involvement in World War II following the attacks on Pearl Harbour. It is interesting to evaluate Star Spangled Rhythm against that seriously important role, and as a result of the highly cooperative American media who rallied so quickly to aid the government. The film itself is clearly designed to be- if not exactly rabble-rousing- an exercise in unifying its intended audience with its motivation, and turning the outrage and pain of Pearl Harbour into something more positive for the war effort, culminating in Bing Crosby's final patriotic number.

Of course the sight of Crosby singing 'Old Glory', effectively questionning what America really means to the film's audience in front of Mount Rushmore might seem impossibly and uncomfortably overly jingoistic to modern audience, but it is an entirely different prospect when measured against the unspeakable attrocities of Pearl Harbour. An attack on home soil- unprecedented before that fateful day but sadly not since- has an incredible effect upon the general public, robbing the sense of safety that was an unconscious presumption and creating a whole new mentality of fear, as witnessed recently in the wake of the 9/11 and London attacks, and so requires a conscious effort to stem the negative tide. We may pour scourn on the cynical obviousness of that imagery from our modern vantage point, but times have changed both in terms of the culture of terrorism and also the power of film studios , and Paramount represented a major power in terms of their ability to affect public opinion at the time.

The unfortunate thing for the film is that it feels somewhat clipped- while the set-pieces are often luxurious and grand, you get the sense that there was a lot more originally filmed, and it is just a shame that not all of it has made it to the final cut. But then the whole project was a quick-silver thing thanks in large part to its propaganda responsibilities and the importance that it landed at exactly the right moment to try and affect public consciousness, so the editing process may well have been further down the list of responsibilities than usual. The haste can probably also be held accountable for the wandering tone and some of the less well-rendered scenes (some of Hope's scenes as ring master are a little loose).

The skits and songs are almost all magnificently realised, particularly Bob Hope's shower scene with William Bendix- not a traditionally appealing-sounding scene, but Hope's attempts to remain undetected within the same shower are hilarious. The success of these skits will be no doubt be held up by some as a symptom of the fact that the film is ostensibly just a collection of them held together fairly flimsily with the pretence of a plot because the skits were designed to mimic the morale-boosting shows that were put on for sailors and soldiers on R&R, but I would argue that that is one of the film's chiefly charming features. The film feels a lot like one of those shows, and it is because of that extra dimension that it is arguably the most culturally significant film of its time- almost certainly of 1942. And if challenged to come up with a film to commit to a time capsule for every year in Hollywood history, I would not hesitate to suggest this near-forgotten gem for that prestigious honour thanks to its easily-underestimated role in the restructuring of a positive American identity in the 1940s.

Overall, I'd say that while Star Spangled Rhythm may not be the best technical film available, it is a wonderful thing in itself enough to justify the cover price, but it is its importance to cinematic history that really propels it to something far more desirable than the usual DVD release. If not for the extraordinary cast, buy it for the historical relevance it represents for that period in 1942 when a wounded nation was limping towards the redemption of helping win the Second World War and exorcising the demons of Pearl Harbour.