Strike Up the Band (MGM, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, December 19) I put on Turner Classic Movies for the next-to-last night of their “Star of the Month” tribute to actor Mickey Rooney. They spent the evening showing all four of his big MGM musicals co-starring Judy Garland: Babes in Arms (1939), Strike Up the Band (1940), Babes on Broadway (1941), and Girl Crazy (1943). The first three were directed by Busby Berkeley and so was the final song, “I Got Rhythm,” for Girl Crazy – only Judy Garland couldn’t stand Berkeley and got him fired from Girl Crazy after they shot the big last production number. Roger Edens, Judy’s musical arranger and director for almost her whole career, didn’t like Berkeley any more than Judy did, and Edens was especially upset that Berkeley brought in two giant cannons and had them fired over “I Got Rhythm,” drowning out much of the inner detail of Edens’s arrangement. The films I watched were Strike Up the Band and Babes on Broadway, both of which were not only directed by Berkeley but co-written by Fred Finklehoffe (with John Monks, Jr. and an uncredited Herbert Fields and Kay Van Riper on Strike Up the Band and Elaine Ryan on Babes on Broadway). Let’s just say that Finklehoffe and his collaborators on each film were well aware of the difficulties in writing and constructing a Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland vehicle and solved them with a lot of resorts to easy deposits in the cliché bank. Strike Up the Band is the one that takes place in the small town of Riverwood (its location is carefully unspecified but is somewhere in the middle West since it’s a relatively easy drive to Chicago. Jimmy Connors (Mickey Rooney) is the predictably bored drummer with the school’s marching band, and he wants to organize the students into a state-of-the-art swing orchestra with Patsy Barton (Judy Garland) as his vocalist. Only his new swing band doesn’t have a place to play until Jimmy and Patsy talk the school’s fearsome but kind-hearted principal, Mr. Judd (Francis Pierlot), into letting him put the band together at his own expense and premiere it at the next regularly scheduled school dance.

Ultimately the kids get word that Paul Whiteman (playing himself – he made his feature-film debut in a 1926 movie called London which was shot there and starred Lillian Gish’s real-life sister Dorothy; he then appeared in a few shorts and his next film was 1930’s King of Jazz, a major Universal musical showcasing Whiteman and his band; after that he wouldn’t appear in a feature again until Thanks a Million in 1935 and an uncredited bit part in Hollywood Hotel from 1937 before this role, replacing Leopold Stokowski in Deanna Durbin’s vehicle One Hundred Men and a Girl, also from 1937, as the deus ex machina who can make the kids’ dreams come true) is doing a nationwide tour. His plan is to stage a contest between high-school bands in which he will personally broadcast the four finalists from Chicago, allow voters to pick one by phone or telegram (once again, kids, the concept behind American Idol was nothing new!) and award the grand prize on air to the contest’s winner. Naturally Jimmy and company seize on this opportunity to make their band a success, but the road to it is paved with the best sorts of not-so-good intentions Finklehoffe, Monks and their uncredited collaborators could provide. First of all, the band’s contract to play at a school dance is a roaring success, but they only get paid $150 and they’re still $50 short of the $200 total (in 1940 dollars!) they need to finance their trip to Chicago. They think they have a shot in a dance party being hosted by the Morgans (George Lessey and Enid Bennett), parents of spoiled rich-bitch Barbara Frances Morgan (June Preisser, repeating her role from Babes in Arms as the girl – in Babes in Arms she was a former child movie star – who tries to vamp Mickey from Judy, though she’s less maddening in this one and turns out to be quite a good acrobat), but the Morgans already have a band set up to play at Barbara’s party – and it turns out to be Paul Whiteman himself, complete with at least two veterans (trumpeter Orville “Goldie” Goldner and banjoist Mike Pingitore) of the late-1920’s Whiteman band with Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer. Whiteman sets up his acres of musicians and plays “When Day Is Done,” a song he’d picked up in Vienna during his 1926 European tour from a song-plugger who later escaped to France and then the U.S., future film director Billy Wilder.

After a couple more songs the musicians take a break, Jimmy and his crew can’t resist the temptation to crash the stage and play the Whiteman boys’ quality instruments, and Whiteman is duly impressed by them and loans them the remaining $50 they need to enter his contest. Only the trip gets sidetracked because Willie Brewster (Larry Nunn), the 14-year-old boy who hangs out with the band and has a decidedly unrequited crush on Patsy (though, let’s face it, the real Judy Garland herself had pretty bad taste in men!), injured himself at an Elks Club benefit the band played as part of their fundraising campaign and he desperately needs a shoulder operation that costs, you guessed it, $200. Jimmy and the boys rather grudgingly forfeit their carefully saved travel fund to pay for Jimmy’s operation, but a local rich guy who helped them get the Elks Club gig in the first place chips in and arranges a private train to get them to Chicago on time. Of course, Jimmy and company win the contest and as the grand prize Jimmy gets to conduct Whiteman’s band, his own and the three other high-school bands he beat in a rousing and overwrought performance of the George and Ira Gershwin classic that gives the song its title. This would have been a much better film if MGM had used the original plot of the 1927 Gershwin stage musical for which the title song had been written, which was essentially an eerie premonition of the 1997 comedy movie Wag the Dog: a U.S. cheese manufacturer lobbies the U.S. government to declare war on Switzerland to stop them from exporting cheese to the U.S. As it stands, Strike Up the Band is a reasonably entertaining musical in which the best numbers are the ones featuring Judy Garland on her own or in duet with Mickey Rooney (who looks utterly convincing as a jazz drummer here and in his film The Strip from 1952, in which he gets a job drumming for Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars; I don’t know for a fact that it was Rooney’s own drumming, but it certainly looks like it!) and the charming “Our Love Affair,” which begins as a Rooney-Garland duet and turns into a great animated sequence in which Rooney demonstrates to Garland the huge orchestra he wants to lead someday by arranging fruits on a dining table.

The models were created by animator and puppeteer Henry Rox, and the scene was staged by future director Vincente Minnelli, who had worked previously on a similar concept in the 1937 film Artists and Models at Paramount. He’d been given a six-month contract and was assigned to do the big “Public Melody No. 1” number for Artists and Models with Martha Raye and Louis Armstrong, but I suspect he also worked on a scene called “Mister Esquire” featuring actor Ben Blue with Russell Patterson’s Personettes, miniature puppets who were manipulated to play in scenes with humans. After his six-month contract with Paramount ended, Minnelli went back to stage work and didn’t come back to Hollywood until 1940, when Arthur Freed offered him a contract at MGM and gave him assignments doing scenes in other people’s movies (including Lena Horne’s numbers for the 1942 Panama Hattie) until Freed gave him the chance to direct a feature, Cabin in the Sky, based on a hit Broadway musical with an all-Black cast. Two years later Minnelli’s and Garland’s paths would cross again in the film Meet Me in St. Louis, in which Judy was driven so crazy at the sheer number of takes Minnelli asked for that she asked Mary Astor, who was playing her mother in the film, “Does this guy know what he’s doing?” “He knows,” Astor replied, and not only did Judy’s initial hatred for Minnelli ease, they started dating and ultimately married after the film was finished and was an enormous hit. (Liza Minnelli was one of the results of their relationship.) Also, at one point in Strike Up the Band Rooney declares his disgust with one of his band members who’s ducking out of rehearsals early to be with his girlfriend Annie, and Rooney says, “Women! To me they’re just – people!” (I joked, “So that’s why he married eight of them.”)