Joe Brady (Gene Kelly) is a wolfish sailor on leave, anxious to hook up with a girl he knows. Clarence Doolittle (Frank Sinatra) is his inexperienced friend who wants Joe to find him a girl. They are dragged in by the police to help deal with a lost child who is running away to join the navy. The kid leads them to his guardian, Susan Abbottt (Kathryn Grayson), who wants to be a singer but canât meet the right people. Both Joe and Clarence fall for her, and silliness ensues.
Whatâs with Gene Kelly being a service man with a few wild days in the city? He kept doing this. Well, Anchors Aweigh isnât On the Town. I just wanted their leave to be over and for them to sail away. Sinatraâs wimpy hick act (who thought this was a good film persona for Sinatra, yet he used it in multiple pictures) is always annoying, but here itâs ghastly. âOh gosh and golly, I donât know anything about them women-folk.â Ah! I didnât want him to get the girl. Or to continue breathing. Kellyâs âgood bad boyâ bit isnât a favorite either, but it doesnât lead me to want to murder him, so thatâs something.
The film is unbalanced. Kelly is a show-tunes and jazz-ballet guy. Graysonâs voice is operatic. The styles donât mix. And the filmmakers donât try. Grayson does her songs off by herself, and Kelly and Sinatra do theirs, with Kelly more often dancing alone since Sinatraâs footwork isâŚnot Kellyâs. Since Grayson doesnât dance, thereâs no partnering there. They belong in different films, and it feels that way. The romance(s) are dead on arrival as well, and the added propaganda moments are cringe worthy (yes, I get why they wanted people to join the navy in 1945). And I choked on the sugary sweet mush involving the child. Pauline Kael called it “stupidly wholesome.”
Kelly has some nice dances, and the cinematography is good, with vibrant colors galore, but thereâs really only one thing thatâs worth the films overlong length (2 hours and twenty minutes!): the famous dance pairing of Kelly and Jerry the mouse. And that dance, like several of Kellyâs, is irrelevant to the story. Itâs a short film stuck in the middle of a too long one, and could have been plucked out and dropped into any other Kelly musical, or just released on its own. It is a classic, but is it enough to force you to sit through the other 2+ hours? Well, times have changed and weâve got home video with fast-forward, which would do wonders for this film. But there’s no reason to even go there. MGM took it and La Cumparsita, another fine dance that doesnât need to be in the picture, and put them both into their Best-of feature, Thatâs Entertainment! And thatâs the final nail in Anchors Aweighâs coffin.
My other reviews of Gene Kelly films: Cover Girl (1944), Ziegfeld Follies (1946), The Pirate (1948), Words and Music (1948), On the Town (1949), Summer Stock (1950), An American in Paris (1951), Brigadoon (1954), It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), Les Girls (1957), The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967).