“Stage Door Canteen” is an extravagant vaudeville-movie in which the few actors left in the world who aren’t in the movies get half a chance not to murder themselves on the screen, and millions of people who aren’t in big cities or the money get half a chance to see them. It is full of fine, enjoyable performances by famous stage people, a plot which is interesting in the same way a carnival freak is, and individual concerts by approximately 352 bands, including Guy Lombardo’s. Clearly, about the second hour, it will remind you of those Mack Sennett automobiles into which an endless, unbelievable parade of people enter. It is, however, one of those rare times when stage actors are sufficiently taken care of by the screen—their material well prepared as movie material, the camera remembering that stage actresses are here movie actresses and must be shot in a movie way (the fact that stage actresses do a lot of talking has never been a reason that the camera must stand there and listen to them), and their acts given enough screen time to get over.
Gypsy Rose Lee steals everything without removing anything but a garter belt and derolling her stockings neatly, expertly and with one finger. It isn’t burlesque, but Miss Lee projects as much rare and gracious femininity by face, timing and voice as Katharine Hepburn projects the opposite at the end of the film with the same means. Miss Lee’s is the most excellently turned, buoyant and delightful movie playing I’ve seen this year. Equally surprising is Katharine Cornell in quite a tough spot: she is dishing out the desserts over the Canteen counter when a piquant rosebud of a soldier breaks into Romeo and Juliet and they go to it over the chocolate cream. Hers is much more grimacing and mouthing than one associates with movie playing, but it is one of those singular times on the screen when it comes off as love, sadness, desire, and not facial gymnastics called Shakespearean. Ethel Merman’s is a much smaller chore, but even this she swells out into something that is the best part of joy, getting full bounty from the worst lyric of the war.
The finesse of these actresses and the way the movie uses them raises doubts as to whether the screen has explored the emotional depths to be achieved with plain acting, the voice in the foreground. The technique of movie playing lately has been toward the negative side of the physical demonstration of emotion. It is obvious from this film that stage acting, if correctly timed and integrated into the movie image, needn’t come out at all theatrical and blown up as in the early days of Lionel Barrymore. There is, to take the voice only, an enormous difference between what is done by these actresses and, for instance, Gary Cooper in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The Misses Lee, Cornell and Ina Claire project a certain emotional state, while Cooper’s natural speaking of lines, if not properly directed, denudes situations of their particular meaning. I am making not a plea for theatricals but for a retreat from the path of barrenness the movies are increasingly pursuing. If the spoken word need not necessarily be fruity, it might at least get clear of the state it has been put in by the Lamour contingent.
Another thing that is clear from this movie is that the jazz band will replace the movie player and the jazz singer the jazz band. Perhaps it is a conspiracy to swell the sales of aspirin.
Tossed in with the abandon of Diamond Jim Brady is a plot. Several unpleasant people have been gathered together to impersonate several unpleasant characters around the theme that a soldier won’t get past the porters in New York without being hooked by a Canteen girl. What happens is that the movie, with lots of boys and girls, unable to be free and easy sexually and still wanting sex to be its theme, falls way over on the most unpleasant side of sex—the tongue hanging out, straining after, grasping for the kind of love which never reaches its goal. If this technique were used for a theme that was actually concerned with sexual teasing it would be perfect, but here it leads to such distorted idiocies as the boy writing the girl who gave him one very small kiss, “You made a man out of me.”
The picture offers a number of suggestions for round-table discussions, such as why a good war song has such a powerful effect on the screen in spite of almost any degree of terrible accompaniment in acting. Also, if producers feel that audiences won’t take Menuhin whole, why do they have him at all (he is here to play “The Flight of the Bumble Bee”)? And is there such a thing as an average type of person from a section, state or city, and must the movies, to establish this, go on calling such a person “Kansas,” “Dakota” or “Jersey”?
Whatever you want to see, in this movie you’ll see it.
July 26, 1943