Anchors Aweigh (1945)

Anchors Aweigh is a Technicolour MGM musical focusing on Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra as two sailors on shore leave in Hollywood.

Kelly did the choreography on two dream sequences show dances which are the highlights of the film. The cameo from Tom and Jerry and the dance with with Jerry The Mouse is what makes this film well known.

The other is the Paso Doble/Tango as Kelly playing a bandit which was impressive.

The storyline of Sinatra being the young, naive sailor who falls for Aunt Susie and later a waitress from Brooklyn. Kelly as the more experienced sailor has a girl waiting for him before being diverted to look after a young Dean Stockwell. A kid who plans to run off to the navy which is a more humdrum affair.

Sinatra never convinces as an innocent and looks too old (He was almost 30 years old.) Stockwell, who almost seventy years after this movie was made is still acting is charming as the kid.

There is good chemistry between Kelly and Sinatra.

The film is overlong and some of the songs just come across as a filler. A good try but not a classic MGM musical.

Fmovies: There are some great bits in the film but this is not a good film. They have taken some of the best talent on the MGM lot at its zenith and produced a long, meandering, hugely inconsistent film with no pacing and no plot. The worst offense is....no charm. It is all a huge waste of fabulous production values and many talented contributors. I think a significant part of the lack of charm is the way MGM handled Mr. Sinatra. Frank was not the kind of white bread handsome hunk who gets the girl in an MGM picture. So they have him end up with a more comic or ethnic type better suited to "his kind." They did it in this picture and in several others. Considering Mr. Sinatra's well documented appeal to women, the joke, in the long run, was on Mr. Mayer and his minions.

Famous for the scene where Gene Kelly dances a duet with Jerry Mouse, this zippy musical is also the one where Kathryn Grayson trills 'Jealousy', and Frank Sinatra sings in the arena of a thousand pianos ('I Fall in Love Too Easily'). Grayson is a young mother who wants more than anything else to be in the movies. Her little boy (Dean Stockwell, who would turn up much later in TV's Quantum Leap) wants to join the US forces, and so he meets sailors Kelly and Sinatra heading out for a bit of leave. There are some echoes of 'On the Town' in this movie, but not enough to spoil the mix.

Anchors Aweigh fmovies. Since I first saw Anchors Aweigh in 1945, viewing it on videotape holds a lot of nostalgia for me. At age 15, it was easy for me to be drawn into the first of the great MGM Technicolor musicals. Now I am perhaps most interested in thinking about the future careers of the leading players. Though Sinatra had done a couple of negligible films soon after his emergence after his Dorsey days, as a solo singer, this was his first major film appearance. As another viewer noted, this seems almost to be a warm-up for On the Town. Sinatra may have had to work hard at it, but his dance with Kelly is credible, and he would do better in their next pairings. However, observing his physique, it's easy to see why he was caricatured as a string bean. Who would have imagined that within a decade he would win an academy award for acting, and go on to play many roles as a tough detective or leader in combat. Though Gene Kelly's personality and dancing dominated this film, his winsome performance did not suggest that he would become a major creative force, almost the iconic figure, for MGM musicals, where he developed a style of dance complementary to that of Fred Astaire. Finally, it was strange to see the fresh-faced Dean Stockwell and remember that he would later play a "thrill" killer in Compulsion, based on the Leopold-Loeb murder from the 1920s. An additional note: One reviewer praised the performance of Betty Garrett as Sinatra's love interest. She later played opposite him in On the Town, but Pamela Britton was featured in this film.

The only reason I give this movie 8/10 stars, and not 10, is because 1) Sinatra is awful and 2) the love interest of Kelly's character leaves much to be desired, (IMHO). Do love that Dean Stockwell, Quantum Leap - Al, is the little boy. The dance sequence with Jerry Mouse is one of the most entertaining and amazing dance sequences I have ever seen. Tom and Jerry is still a personal favorite of mine and my daughter's. I'm 28 and she's 4, so while the character is less iconic than Mickey, he is still a favorite of many children and adults today. Kelly is as always captivating, his eyes full of fun and excitement. In every movie I have ever seen him in, he always steals the show. One of the best dancers of the 20th century. It is no wonder Paula Abdul "sampled" Kelly's moves. I would also list Gene Kelly as one of the most beautiful people of the 20th century. If you were to watch only one part, don't miss Kelly's dance with Jerry Mouse. You will NOT be disappointed.

This one has a totally predictable plot with a very Irritating Dean Stockwell and a shrill Kathryn Grayson. The musical numbers save the movie: "The Worry Song" with Jerry and Gene Kelly; "I Fall In Love Too Easily" by Frank Sinatra; the dance number with the little Spanish girl (Sharon McManus), too many others to list. More good than bad; but musical numbers are spare in the first hour, plentiful afterwards. But that first hour is trying when the cast isn't singing.

You can begin to see the beginning of the cracks in the foundation of MGM's formula here. This came out the year that WWII ended, and yet they are sticking to this pre-warrish happy sappy musical formula with clean cut kids. They would get away with this for a couple of more years before the problems began to be projected at the box office.