Friday Flick: Private Buckaroo

Now that the holidays are over (thanks be to God!), I think I'll continue the movie theme. Out of curiosity, does anyone actually watch any of these when I put them up? I know my tastes aren't everybody's, but there are some good films out there that have slipped into the public domain, and I do love sharing them along with armchair reviews.

Today's feature has kind of a double appeal. First off, it's a wonderful musical in and of itself. The plot is thin as dishwater, but that doesn't really matter. It's not meant to win any Oscars; it's a vehicle for some of the best music of the WWII era. The Andrews Sisters head up the bill, with some songs that will sound mighty familiar. As far as I can tell, this movie is where the song "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" originated, in a really surreal USO performance. There's some lovely performances by the legendary Harry James, including a running gag where some kid in boot camp tries to teach him to blow a bugle. In between, there's some cute comic bits from Shemp Howard (the oldest of the Stooges, and the most talented, for my money) playing off Mary Wickes. (Young 'uns will remember her as the crusty old nun in Sister Act.) The film runs just over an hour, most of which is devoted to the music.

The other side of this movie is a much more important one, to my mind. It's hard for us today to believe that there was ever a time when every move the government (and especially the military) wasn't subjected to immediate dissection and critique by any ignoramus who thought he knew better. Today's military actions are presumed to be war crimes until proven otherwise. Actors, journalists and other self-ordained intellectuals actually consider themselves morally superior to soldiers. Americans actually treat the sort of people who block troop supply trucks with their bodies as though they had a valid point of view that deserved to be heard.

But in 1942 things were very different. Private Buckaroo was released six months after Pearl Harbor, and the contrast just jumps out and smacks you between the eyes. Up until the December 7 attack, there were dissenting voices about whether we should or shouldn't get involved in a war. After the bombing, there weren't. Or if there were, they were silenced, not by government force, but by social disdain. (Yes, some government censorship came along with a declaration of war. But most of it was necessary only to keep military movements secret.) Conscription was used to man the armed services, but as a response to an overwhelming number of men all trying to enlist at once. My grandfather tried his damnedest (his word) to get in, but the Navy turned him down for bad eyesight, and the Army because he was missing his trigger finger. He resentfully had to settle for working in a shipyard. This was the norm, he told me, not the exception.

There were conscientious objectors at that time, too: Quakers, Mennonites, and other pacifists. So did they throw things at soldiers or deliver jeremiads in favor of the enemy? They did not. In Britain, they volunteered for Bomb Disposal, a specialty that carried an average life expectancy of two weeks. In the States, a group of 500 Quakers offered themselves to the War Department as human test subjects – guinea pigs. I could respect the current crop of peaceniks if they were willing to do the same. But they don't; they think they're contributing by sneering at their betters.

What plot there is in this film reflects that. The protagonist (Dick Foran) is a singer who has been trying to get into the Army, and keeps getting turned down. Harry James gets drafted, and he's happy about it. (His employer isn't, and gets called a heel for it.) A very young Donald O'Connor gives Foran a one-line lesson in placing duty ahead of pride. One of the Andrews sisters says "If I were a man, the Army is where I'd be." Their subtext all through the film is that men in uniform are the only ones a woman would be interested in. There's even an appalling segment where Foran sings about "the monkey men from Tokyo." The enemy is evil and sub-human, slackers are despicable, the American soldiers are the good guys, and the women are behind them one hundred and ten percent.

Propaganda? Of course. But it's propaganda that won the war. In 1942, an American victory was far from a foregone conclusion. We were trying to fight on two fronts, one of which was against an enemy who had never attacked us directly. (Sound familiar?) Had American industry not worked overtime (and stopped turning out civilian goods), had the Hollywood studios not bolstered morale so one-sidedly, had politicians – as they do today - competed to see who could interfere with the president more obnoxiously, it's entirely likely that America would have been beaten. I doubt that either the Japanese or the Germans had the wherewithal actually to invade and occupy the United States for the long term, but we certainly could have been beaten back to our own shores, and Germany in particular would have posed a serious threat after Europe was finished off. Propaganda went a long way toward unifying the country. Frankly, we're very, very fortunate that we haven't had to be involved in a war for our own survival since then. With our current cultural attitudes, we'd lose. Watching movies like this remind us that America doesn't have to be like it is now.

So here, for both your musical and your patriotic enjoyment, is Private Buckaroo: