Saturday, August 06, 2011

SOMETHING FOR THE BOYS (1944)

Three cousins who don't know each other inherit a rundown Southern plantation and decide to fix it up and rent out rooms to Army wives so they can live near their hubbies at a nearby barracks. The mismatched cousins are Phil Silvers (perpetually boorish and unfunny), Vivian Blaine (pleasant if unexceptional), and Latin bombshell Carmen Miranda. Gruff sergeant Michael O'Shea gets sweet on Blaine while they all collaborate to put on a show to cover the renovation expenses. Sheila Ryan provides some conflict as O'Shea’s obnoxious former girlfriend, and Perry Como has one of his few acting roles as the handsome soldier with whom Ryan gets involved. There's not much here if you're not already a fan of Miranda's; she is fun but her running gag about getting radio reception through her teeth gets tiresome. There is a war games sequence and some suspense generated when the house is declared off-limits because of a misunderstanding, but everything is righted in the end. The songs are average, the one standout being "Eighty Miles Out of Atlanta." Several people on IMDb claim this has been shown frequently with reels out of order, but that seems to have been fixed for the DVD release. [DVD]

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