by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran the last item we hadn’t watched on the Alice Faye
Collection, Volume 2 boxed set: Four
Jills in a Jeep, an odd item to appear on
an Alice Faye box because she only appears for one song, a modern-dress version
of “You’ll Never Know” from her big film Hello, Frisco, Hello which somehow seems to be more moving here, shorn of
the period trappings of Hello, Frisco, Hello and in mellow black-and-white instead of
Technicolor, even though she may have sung here to the same pre-recording she
made for the earlier film. Four Jills in a Jeep (a title which for years I got confused with another
wartime musical, Four Jacks and a Jill, which was made by RKO and was yet the third recycling of the Street
Girl/That Girl from Paris plot line) actually
began life when the U.S. entered World War II in December 1941 and, by
executive order, President Franklin Roosevelt created the United Services
Organization (USO) to provide entertainment to the troops both at training
camps in the U.S. and overseas, including in actual combat zones. Among the
big-name celebrities who made the trips were Kay Francis, Martha Raye, Carole
Landis and Mitzi Mayfair, who isn’t as well known as the other three because
she was a well-known dancer on stage and made a number of those charming
vest-pocket musical shorts for Warners/Vitaphone in New York with Hal LeRoy but
did only one feature film, this one. Carole Landis — who’s probably best known
today for playing Betty Grable’s ill-fated sister in the 1941 mystery I
Wake Up Screaming (she’s killed early on
and Grable teams with her boyfriend, Victor Mature, to solve the crime) and for
her bizarre suicide on July 4, 1948 at age 29. She’d already been married and
divorced four times (her third marriage, to a servicemember she met on a USO
tour, is dramatized in this film) when she started an affair with actor Rex
Harrison even though he was still
married to German expat actress Lilli Palmer. When Harrison ended their affair
and went back to his wife, a despondent Landis, who even before had been prone
to fits of depression, took her own life — and Harrison became persona
non grata in Hollywood and didn’t make a
U.S. comeback until his stage triumph in the 1956 musical My Fair
Lady.
Anyway, the USO tour Francis, Raye,
Landis and Mayfair made took them to London and then to the combat zone in
North Africa — and Landis wrote (or someone ghost-wrote for her, or she and a
ghost writer collaborated) a book about their experiences which she (or
someone) called Four Jills in a Jeep. According to a documentary featurette included with the DVD, Landis
was the only Hollywood star who
wrote a memoir about their USO experiences. So 20th Century-Fox, the
studio which had Landis under contract (the other three were all free-lancing
by then), decided to develop a film based on their real-life experiences in
which the four stars would play themselves, and while the movie (written by
Robert Ellis, Helen Logan and someone or something called Snag Werris from a
story by Froma Sand and Fred Niblo, Jr., and directed by William A. Seiter at
least marginally better than
Irving Cummings or Walter Lang helmed the usual generic Fox musicals). They
built it around the real-life Armed Forces Radio Service program Command
Performance, which was advertised as being
built entirely from songs and sketches requested by American servicemembers
writing in from combat zones (ironically the German government was producing exactly the same sort of
show for their troops; it was
called Wunschkonzert, which
literally means “Wish Concert” but is usually translated as “Request Concert”),
and Command Performance was the
working title for the film. But eventually Fox decided to go with the title of
Landis’s book and release the movie as Four Jills in a Jeep even though, predictably, the story in the movie
didn’t have that much to do with
the real-life tale in the book. What they came up with was an interesting,
entertaining and blessedly short (91 minutes — one advantage of the older films
is they don’t suffer from the narrative bloat of all too many present-day
releases, at least partly because in the 1940’s you often got a feature, a “B,”
several cartoons and one or two shorts in a movie program instead of the billed
feature being the only thing you
got to watch, the way it is now) mixture of musical, comedy and war movie, in
which the girls (that’s the word that would have been used then!) get to go in
the first place because Raye says they’d serve abroad if they could, and later
they get to North Africa because Landis issues a similar dare that they’d go to
a combat zone if only they were allowed to.
I was a bit disturbed by the fact
that the final scene, supposedly taking place as an impromptu show in a North
African building while it’s being shelled by the enemy, is accompanied (like
all the other performances in the movie) by Jimmy Dorsey’s orchestra — he was
one of the guest stars called in to bolster the film’s appeal and, even though
he’s playing himself, he probably had more dialogue in this movie than in any
other he made (and it was ironic, after listening to his early performances on
“Cornfed” and “Mean Dog Blues” from 1927 with Red Nichols on Albert Haim’s
latest WBIX online radio program, to be watching and hearing him at the peak of
his career in this film) — instead of being backed only by the ratty old piano
that would likely have been the only instrument available in that environment.
The guest stars include Faye, Carmen Miranda (who’s shown singing “I-I-I-I I Like
You Very Much,” not one of her stronger songs, and Miranda lost a lot every time she was filmed in black-and-white; she
really needed color to shine) and Betty Grable (singing “Cuddle Up a Little
Closer,” one of the many ancient songs she had to perform in all the period
musicals 20th Century-Fox kept assigning her). Dick Haymes is also
in it, making his film debut (a special credit tells us that, though he was
already a “name” in the music industry — he’d followed Frank Sinatra in the
bands of both Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, and for good measure he’d stopped
into Benny Goodman’s as well, and had just signed a solo recording contract
with Decca in 1943; given how opposed Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck was to
his stars making records — instead of promoting the films, he thought records
of his stars singing songs from their movies would lead people to buy the
records instead of paying to see
the films — he must really have
wanted Haymes to take him when he already had a record contract) and actually
playing an acting role as Lieutenant Dick Ryan. Of course, he’s mainly there to
sing, and he does that well enough, singing the haunting ballad “How Blue the
Night” (written, like most of the new songs in the film, by Jimmy McHugh,
composer, and Harold Adamson, lyrics), and an O.K. song called “You Send Me.”
Haymes came out at about the same time as Frank Sinatra and Perry Como, and
though he lacked both Sinatra’s eloquent phrasing and Como’s fabled smoothness,
he was a quite interesting singer who was briefly successful but never really
achieved superstardom or lasting fame.
What’s good about Four Jills
in a Jeep is the wartime urgency of it all
— though the North African war was pretty much over by the time it was made,
the war overall was still going on and the parts about the women saying they want to fight and would do so if only they were allowed
to “play” quite differently now that the U.S. has finally got rid of the ban on
women servicemembers in combat. Though quite obviously shot on the 20th
Century-Fox backlot, the North Africa scenes are quite credible at creating the
illusion of combat conditions and providing a powerful and surprisingly
dramatic ending to a film that for the most part was an un-serious
morale-booster. Four Jills in a Jeep
is an engaging film, even though the writing committee is quite obviously
shoehorning the real story of the four female stars’ actual USO trip into the
well-honed and hardend conventions of movie clichés — and it seems an odd
choice for a boxed set honoring Alice Faye, since she’s only shown for about
five minutes doing one sing that was already part of her repertoire. Week-End
in Havana, the superb tropical musical from
1941 would have made a better fit in either of the Faye boxed sets, or the
Carmen Miranda box for that matter, since they’re both in it and they have
major roles. Incidentally, the DVD of Four Jills in a Jeep also includes three of the five songs that were
deleted from the movie before release — Martha Raye in a surprisingly
restrained (especially for her!) version of “Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer,”
Kay Francis half-singing and half-rapping her way through a new Kelser-Adamson
song called “It’s the Old Army Game” and a definitely pre-pubescent kid dueting
with Sebastian on the dance floor before Francis herself calls a halt to the
proceedings, reminding us that in 1936 she was playing the mother and Deanna
Durbin her wayward daughter; and Carmen Miranda doing the Brazilian song
“Mamae Yo Quero” (which I first heard in Spanish, as “Mama Yo Quiero,” on a record by Xavier Cugat), which shows her off a lot better than “I-I-I-I I Like You Very Much.”
