You can't really appreciate the pace and style of the great movie musicals until you've seen some lousy ones like this. A really awful 1930s or 1940s musical movie can induce a sort of restful trance, and take you into another world of stunned tedium. If you know only Rodgers and Hart's great songs which survived shows and became standards, you'll be astounded by how many strained and stupid ones come in between them in the course of a plotted show. The story-scenes are acted in a stiff and disinterested style. Actors seem just to be waiting for others to stop speaking so they can say their lines, rather than actually listening to each other. And why should they listen? What they say is overwritten, repetitious, and yet often indirect and incomplete as far as telling the story is concerned. The plot manages to be both contrived and clumsy, unlikely to the point of being fantastic--yet who would fantasize such dreariness? This effect is probably partly the result of prudish Hollywood trying to adapt a supposedly "spicy" script direct from supposedly "wicked" and "sophisticated" Broadway, and therefore inserting or deleting lines to keep the script "clean" but still leave the impression that it's "daring." But the prudishness seems hypocritical, and the sophistication way, way overestimated. Trying to convey both attitudes, yet neither, the actors become robotic and stressed. And the sets are so stagy that it's a shock when suddenly one scene is played on a real ball-field. Perhaps the most characteristic moment comes when Lucille Ball makes a remark about a boyfriend which is clearly the lead-in for a song, and then, as mechanically as a wind-up toy, while the other actors in the room watch helplessly, with nothing to do, crosses a whole room, goes out onto a porch, hits a position, stares into a light, and lip-syncs woodenly to a voice obviously not hers. Another: after what seems an endless discussion of the troubled finances of a college (which turn out to have nothing to do with the story at all), one boy donates the three hundred dollars (?) that's needed, and the college is opened, at which point for some reason everyone participates in a production number called, "Cakewalk, 'Cause We Got Cake," possibly left over from some other situation in the Broadway original (some of its lyrics seem to relate to Depression optimism), and performed not as a cakewalk, but a swing number. Also, as is to be expected in a "college musical" of the time, the main characters are far past college age, so their sexual coyness seems retarded. The ultimate effect is one of dreamlike slowness and isolation and illogic, making this trivial nonsense seem related to the existential sadness of De Chirico's paintings or Kafka's novels. The movie may be even more bewildering to younger viewers today because of changed social attitudes. A long scene among four boys is oblique to the point of mystery because in 1940 none of them could actually say that certain girls wearing certain "beanie" caps are virgins (there are a couple of incredibly labored attempts later at jokes about these caps). Lucille Ball, giving an old Native American man a letter to carry for her to a lover, calls the messenger, "Boy," and Latino Desi Arnaz not only has an awkward gay joke early in the film, but later performs a song called "I'm Spic and Spanish."
