Three Cheers for the Girls (1943) Online

Just watched this musical compilation short on the Thank Your Lucky Stars DVD. In this one, a bevy of chorus girls sing of their parts in various Warner Bros. musical movies though it's safe to assume since the clips shown are nearly a decade old, none of them were actually participants. Anyway, they're Busby Berkeley sequences that he did for the studio before his eventual departure for M-G-M in 1939. Oh, and the last archived number is actually that of Dick Powell and various men singing "Over the Sea" and "From the Halls of Montezuma". Anyway, this was quite enjoyable and so for that reason, Three Cheers for the Girls is well worth a look.

Three Cheers for the Girls (1943)

*** (out of 4)

Good if extremely cheap short from Warner has them taking clips from their older musicals and throwing them together with a new wraparound story added. Musical numbers from GOLD DIGGERS OF 1935, GOLD DIGGERS OF 1937, FASHIONS OF 1934 and THE SINGING MARINE are just some of the clips shown here. This is somewhat of a hard film to judge because on one hand you have to admit that this thing is pretty cheap by just taking previously seen music clips and putting them together as a "new" movie. With that said, back in 1943 it was extremely hard to see these clips so I'm sure some people enjoyed seeing Dick Powell sing "The Song of the Marines" or David Carlyle doing "I'll Sing You a Thousand Songs" from CAIN AND MABEL. There's no question that these musical clips are nice but at the same time you should really check out the complete movies and see the songs in their original form. The wraparound story really isn't anything too special as we enter the dressing room to some chorus girls who sing us a new song while explaining that they're the ones in these clips that people don't pay attention to. Really? I'm sure many males were checking out these pretty ladies back when they appeared on the screen.

. . . dance master "Busby Berkeley" should know that bass drums, white flags, flower bouquets, schools of baby grand pianos, floral arches, tropical leis, and a bongo drum phalanx are no substitute for the Real Thing: honest-to-goodness cold hard blue steel All-American guns! Throughout a nearly 17-minute routine (including clips from four feature films), the closest thing we see to heat in THREE CHEERS FOR THE GIRLS are some fake cannons at the beginning of the initial movie clip. Though this first company of marching broads suffers the most from the female formations' lack of firepower, it's impossible to argue that a few dozen military-style assault rifles would not jazz up all of the other segments of THREE CHEERS FOR THE GIRLS as well. Furthermore, the framing sequences performed by the self-proclaimed "Flora Dora Chorus" would pack a lot more punch IF viewers could see that these half-clad green room gals were packing. There would be NO need for them to worry that "We're the girls They undress to dress a scene" IF audiences could give THREE CHEERS for the gats shoved into garter belts and derringers dangling next to derrieres!

. . . as it threatens to replace Real Life with scary geometric phalanxes of lingerie-clad singing chicks in attack formations. Whether these women are wielding bugles, drums, white flags, harps, grand pianos, or Hawaiian leis, they are a clear threat to Life as We Know It. When you crown 100 ladies with blonde George Washington wigs, and round out their attire with a few feathers and G-strings, what guy could watch and get to work on time the next morning? No doubt on orders from the Top Brass, the final two and a half minutes of this schizophrenic 16-minute short segue abruptly into a total military sausage fest. An all-male chorus in U.S. Marine uniforms intones the Marine Hymn as amphibious landing training exercises fill the screen. One can only conclude that THREE CHEERS FOR THE GIRLS was some sort of psychological warfare foray orchestrated by the War Department's Military Intelligence unit in mid-WWII. This piece was intended to show the Axis Powers that a nation capable of foisting off such a Sex & War Mish-Mash upon the World would be capable of anything--up to and including dropping A-Bombs!