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| Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in Strike Up the Band |
At one point in Strike Up the Band, the kids put on a show that's a burlesque of a "Gay Nineties" melodrama. Which might remind us that 1890 and 1940 were not so remote from each other as 2020 is from 1940. We might even look at a film like High School Musical (Kenny Ortega, 2006) or a TV series like Glee (2009-2015) as a burlesque of Strike Up the Band, except they took the subject matter more seriously than the kids in the 1940 movie did the material of old-time melodrama. Strike Up the Band is a still-honored subgenre, the "hey, kids, let's put on a show" musical. It has all the caricaturable excesses of its kind: big musical numbers that would never fit on an actual stage; the struggle to raise money for the show; the setback when one kid gets sick; the protagonist struggling with whether to become a musician or a physician; the teen romance that isn't quite gelling; the kindly, understanding mother; and even a rousing finale that actually waves the flag. Unfortunately, it's also something of a dud, especially considering the talent involved: Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, and direction by Busby Berkeley. But this is the Berkeley of the MGM years, not the unfettered "choreographer of space" of the Warner Bros. musicals of the early 1930s -- or even the Berkeley who snuck over to 20th Century Fox in 1943 and gave Carmen Miranda a tutti-frutti hat in one of the craziest moments in The Gang's All Here. At MGM he was reined in too much, though you can sense him yearning to break free in numbers like the title sequence and "Do the La Conga." Garland sings some mostly unmemorable songs well -- though MGM bought the rights to the 1927 stage musical by George and Ira Gershwin, it retained only the title song; the rest are by Roger Edens and the film's producer, Arthur Freed, along with some period oldies for the melodrama sequence. And Rooney is as manic as he ever got on film: dancing, mugging, and frenetically playing the drums. Still, at 120 minutes, Strike Up the Band sags a little too often, especially in a stop-motion puppetry sequence in which Rooney imagines conducting an orchestra made up of fruit -- an idea that Vincente Minnelli came up with and producer Freed enthusiastically adapted. Better songs and a brighter supporting cast might have helped, and the 40-year-old hairlines on some of the supposed high school students are too much in evidence.
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