Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day One Hundred and Fourteen: Sail Away

The 1940s era are an odd mix of films it seems that going into the future we'll have a lot of big budget musicals that have won or have been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. But back at the 1946 ceremony Hollywood was still in its infacy there were a few musicals around but on the whole they weren't as grandiose as they'd become in the next couple of decades. However that's not true of our next nominee - Anchors Aweigh which features two of the best song and dance men of all time in Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. The scant plot sees Kelly and Sinatra's two able seamen get granted four days leave from their naval duties and go off to Hollywood. Kelly's Joe wants to see his girl Lola but at the same time wants to help Sinatra's Clarence find love. Together they find a lost boy, Donald and when Clarence locks eyes on Donald's aunt Susan he falls for her and the pair make up a false appointment with a music producer so they can see her again. However through the course of events it is Joe who falls for Susan meanwhile Clarence meets a girl from his hometown of Brooklyn and starts to fall for her. As you can imagine there are lots of misunderstood glances, big musical numbers along the way and everything sort of working itself out by the final number.

I had already heard of Anchors Aweigh as it is the film that includes the iconic scene in which Gene Kelly dances with Jerry of Tom and Jerry fame. The reason why he does this still really didn't become apparent on watching the film however it seemd to be some sort of fantasy sequence that Joe was making up to impress a class of kids. Obviously I recognised the films titular track and the song 'I Know Susie' was also familiar but the film is packed with songs which in my opinion outweigh the plot and I found myself almost predicting when the next song would come along from the lines that were being spoken. Gene Kelly sort of holds the film together at the time Sinatra was still a nervous screen presence and Clarence doesn't really have a lot of oomph to him and Kathryn Grayson and Pamela Britton's love interests are both fairly thinly drawn and are just there to sing and fall in love with their respective partners. Its quite a jolly film and there's nothing particularly bad about it but personally I need a bit of meat in my musicals and I think I will get that as the Oscar Challenge goes into the next decade.