Strike Up the Band

No I don't care what anybody says Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland were excellent miss film both young actors at the time and the singing and the music was superb. Yeah I mean it was a film on a 1940 remember that! But I loved Judy Garland and always will

I love the Mickey/Judy movies and this is a wonderful example of a superb one, but of the three "lets put on a show" type movies this is the worst. It's still fantastic don't get me wrong, but Babes in Arms and Babes on Broadway are much better! The songs are fantastic but not as catchy as the songs from the other movies. Judy is fantastic! It just tears your heart when she sings Nobody. It's a perfect blend of humor and music in this movie. Fantastic. If you like this one, I absolutely recommend Babes in Arms and Babes on Broadway. (Babes on Broadway is my favorite movie ever) It's great! you really should watch this movie!

After the success of Babes In Arms for MGM, Arthur Freed became the hottest producer on the lot and was granted his own famous Freed Unit to produce the best of the MGM musicals for the next 20 years almost. According to Hugh Fordin's book on Arthur Freed the next scheduled property was Good News, but that got shelved for several years when Louis B. Mayer decided that a patriotic type theme was in order and after all MGM had bought the screen rights to the Gershwin musical Strike Up The Band. Freed agreed, but in the Hollywood tradition only the title and the title song were retained for the screen.

That was enough because the Mickey and Judy formula was by now established with Babes In Arms. Here the two are a pair of talented musical kids and Mickey is the drummer in his high school band. But he's got other things on his mind besides doing John Philip Sousa. Even Sousa did more than Sousa when he was leading a band. Mickey is filled with the new jive rhythms of the day and he'd like to use the other kids in the school orchestra to form a real band. He's got Garland in mind for the vocals and the object is to get an audition from Paul Whiteman.

Whiteman in his day may have appropriated for himself the title of King Of Jazz, but certainly no one did more to popularize the new American art form among white audiences. His orchestra was the training ground for many of later big band leaders. Leaders like Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey and Glenn Miller all who were sidemen with Whiteman and who kids like Mickey and Judy and the rest of the cast were listening to.

If Strike Up The Band isn't exactly let's put on a show, it still is let's put on a concert and Mickey and Judy do have some shtick to perform, their Gay Nineties spoof is quite good. Also the fantasy sequence of the 'fruit orchestra' doing Our Love Affair is also nicely done, it looks very much like Ray Harryhausen's claymation figures, but he wasn't involved with Strike Up The Band.

Strike Up The Band won one Academy Award for sound and was nominated for two others. Roger Edens and Arthur Freed wrote Our Love Affair which was nominated for Best Song, but lost to When You Wish Upon A Star. And Edens and Georgie Stoll were nominated for Best Musical Scoring.

Busby Berkeley directed the film and in the finale shows his fine hand for spectacle. Here's where the patriotism that Louis B. Mayer was seeking came out. Remember this was 1940 and a lot of people were very afraid the USA was going into another World War. The finale with the title song was the kind of rousing patriotic spectacle that Hollywood would be doing in every studio after December 7, 1941.

With Strike Up The Band Arthur Freed proved he was no flash in the pan as a producer. After 70 years the film holds up well and the talents of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland reign eternal.

A delightful high-energy romp. I think Mickey Rooney outshines Judy Garland in this one (but that might be like comparing apples to oranges, which incidentally play a not incidental role in this movie). Mickey plays the piano, the drums, sings, dances, pitches baseballs and jumps over fences and hedgerows....plus he's good to his widowed mother and turns up the "life's a gas" charm at the drop of a hat. Judy is more serious, reflective, and tender, all of which works well in the songs she performs. I could have done without the extended "Snidely Whiplash" melodrama routine, but hey, what's perfect in this world. The teenagers in this movie, however, look like miniature adults, and moreover, some of Mickey's band members look a little long in the tooth. Was there really a time when jazz was the most shocking thing a kid could be interested in?

Overlong but fun Mickey & Judy "let's put on a show" musical, directed by the great Busby Berkeley. Drummer Jimmy (Mickey Rooney) and would-be girlfriend Mary (Judy Garland) try to make their high school band a success. Along the way they deal with little personal dramas like Jimmy's mother wanting him to be a doctor, a new girl in town who captures Jimmy's eye, and one of the band members needing an emergency operation. The musical numbers are good, if not particularly memorable. Mickey & Judy are terrific, as always. It's probably pretty corny stuff for those who aren't fans but, if you enjoy these types of movies, I'm sure you'll have a good time with this one.