Orchestra Wives (20th Century-Fox, 1042)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Between the second and third group of “Soundies” TCM showed last night they inserted the 1942 film Orchestra Wives, the second and last film Glenn Miller made with his civilian band just before enlisting in the U.S. ARmy Air Corps (now the United States Air Force) and creating a new band whose task it was to play at Air Corps bases and training centers in hopes of boosting the servicemembers’ morale. Orchestra Wives is an odd film in which small-town girl Connie Ward (Ann Rutherford, best known as Mickey Rooney’s usual girlfriend in the Andy Hardy movies) is star-struck over Gene Morrison’s big band (note that writers James Prindle, Karl Tunberg and Darrell Ward gave Miller’s character the same initials as his own so he could use his familiar “GM” bandstands). In particular she’s star-struck over Miller’s – oops, I mean “Morrison’s” – star trumpet soloist, Bill Abbot (George Montgomery). She makes her small-town boyfriend take her to a “Gene Morrison” appearance at an outdoor dance garden, and once there she jilts him and falls for Abbot. The two get married on the spot – itself a rather nervy concept in the Production Code era – only this means that innocent little Connie becomes one of the band’s “orchestra wives.” The film, directed by hack Archie Mayo, is essentially the plot of the 1936 play and 1939 movie The Women grafted into a big swing musical.

Connie learns that the other “orchestra wives” are continually gossiping about each other’s husbands and which ones are chasing after which wives, or just looking for extra-relational partners available to them on the road as the band constantly tours. The real villainess of the piece is Jaymie Stevens (Lynn Bari, voice-doubled by Pat Friday as she had been in Miller’s previous film, Sun Valley Serenade), “Morrison’s” band singer and Bill Abbot’s ex, though of course she doesn’t want to stay his “ex.” They had broken up at least a year before Bill married Connie, but Jaymie uses all the tried and true stratagems of a predatory female in a Production Code-era movie to break up Bill and Connie, including tricking Bill into coming to her room in his robe on the pretext of needing to borrow $30 to bail her (nonexistent) brother out of jail. Connie ultimately joins the gossiping and her revelations lead the “Morrison” band to break up, though she reunites them by sending each member phony telegrams, ostensibly from other bandleaders, asking them to show up, ostensibly for interviews with other bands but actually to get the “Morrison” band back together.

When I first saw Orchestra Wives I liked it a lot better than I do now – today George Montgonery in the lead just seems annoying (when I saw The Brasher Doubloon recently I thought he was annoying because he was so miscast as Philip Marlowe, but he’s just as bad here even in a far less demanding role) and I can’t help but wonder what this film might have been like if Darryl Zanuch had been aboe to borrow John Garfield from Warner Bros. for the role – and Ann Rutherford is all dewy-eyed sweetness until she gets thrown into a cage with the cats – I mean the other “orchestra wives” – and though she doesn’t don “Jungle Red’ nail polish the way the similarly innocent heroine of The Women does, it amounts to the same thing – and, sensibly, Jaymie is the one former member of the “Morrison” band she does not invite to rejoin. (I was tempted to joke, “Well, they could always get Pat Friday.”) Predictably, what saves this movie is the great Glenn Miller music ≠ including the film’s big hit, “(I Got a Gal in) Kalamazoo” – the obvious follow-up to “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” from the previous Miller film, Sun Valley Serenade, and as in the previous film they have the Nicholas Brothers do a spectacular dance routine to it at the end (when the reunited “Morrison” band performs at the Glen Island Casino, a real big=band venue in New Rochelle, Westchester County in upstate New York, where the real Glenn Miller had got an important career boost).

Other songs from the film include “At Last” (in its original swing version before Etta James transformed it 20 years later into a wrenching R&B/soul number) and “Serenade in Blue” (a haunting song that was remodeled extensively by modern jazz bassist-bandleader Charles Mingus for a live date in 1955). There’s also a quite swinging version of F. W., Measham’s turn-of-the-last-century march “American Patrol” featuring drummer Maurice “Mo” Purtill, who’s usually the drummer swing fans love to hate (critic and Miller biographer George T. Simon snippily dismissed him as substandard, especially compared to Ray McKinley, who handled the drum chair in Miller’s military band) but who sounds great here.