New Picture

Stage Door Canteen (United Artists) is Hollywood's double-jumbo version of the kind of entertainment that happens nightly at Manhattan's Stage Door Canteen for men in uniform. In the picture a number of lovelorn soldiers and their canteen girls are deluged with an avalanche of celebrity performances that keeps pouring for more than two hours.

This huge vaudeville is a richer and stranger mixture than the late B. F. Keith ever devised. High sentiments are compounded with Harpo Marx's ogling of the girls. No sooner has Ray Bolger done some hilarious hoofing than hard-working Gracie Fields sings Albert Hay Malotte's soulful version of The Lord's Prayer. No sooner has Edgar Bergen traded wisecracks with his lively pieces of lumber, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, than Katharine Cornell engages in a bit of Romeo and Juliet with a soldier who remembers his Shakespeare. Ethel Waters has scarcely finished syncopating with Count Basic's Afric jazz band when Yehudi Menuhin steps forward to render Schubert's Ave Maria on his expensive violin.

The film's patriotism is as torrential as its talent and may give civilians as well as servicemen a drowning sensation (examples in song: Marching Through Berlin; The Machine-Gun Song). But Stage Door Canteen is not only a big show with something for almost everybody, but also a potentially fine period piece recording a regiment of wartime show people and their uniformed audience.

Good shots: Director Frank Borzage's dance-floor crowds moving to hot and sweet music by Benny Goodman, Kay Kyser, Guy Lombardo, Freddy Martin. --

"Snap to it, Buddy! Dry that mess kit and shuffle them dogs! Elsie Janis at the Y.M. tonight!"

This happy line, from Sergeant Eddie Hartman's 1918 Variety notice of the Elsie Janis A.E.F. camp show, epitomizes the tone of troop entertainment in World War I. What it lacked in polish it more than made up in razzmatazz. Forthright, gangling, cartwheeling Elsie Janis was the greatest favorite of them all. Her persistent yawp "Are we downhearted?" was rarely if ever answered incorrectly. Greatest band--greater even than Sousa's --was Jim Europe's Negro aggregation which, at a bands-of-all-nations celebration in Paris, stopped the show with St. Louis Blues.

The naked Y Huts of the Western Front housed many artists from the dusty, anonymous pantheon of American vaudeville. To entertain the troops, about 300 professional entertainers, supplemented on the spot by countless soldier-actors, went to France. Usually the soldier-spectators crowded the huts hours ahead of time and stood outside the windows.

In the U.S., meanwhile, Variety was writing of Sergeant Irving Berlin's Yip,

Yip, Yap hank, "A great show by a great bunch. There's no theatrical manager who wouldn't grab it without the uniforms." Private Earl Carroll made half of a recruiting act which played Manhattan vaudeville theaters. Federal officers seized copies of the song It'll Be a Hot Time for the Old Boys when the Young Men go to War. Notable entertainers who volunteered to go overseas were John Drew, Billie Burke, Jane Cowl. Lillian Russell, Walter Damrosch. Maude Adams.

Hearts and Beasts. Cinema stars, in ratio to the tender age of their trade, took a less active part than they do today. Pin-up girls were as likely to come from the Police Gazette as from movie magazines. The bond-selling tours of such figures as Fairbanks. Pickford, Hart and Chaplin, though vociferous, were mild compared with the riotous junkets of World War II. Even the publicity stunts had a certain innocence. Sample: Mary Pickford's "adoption" of 600 men of the 2nd Battalion, ist California Field Artillery, each of whom wore her picture in a gold locket and, for the duration, undertook to use tobacco she furnished.

But the stars went to the soldiers in patriotic bursts of celluloid which World War II has yet to touch. They went in pictures like Hearts of the World; The Kaiser, Beast of Berlin; the wonderful Shoulder Arms and the somewhat less wonderful but far more typical The Little American, in which German soldiers battered at the stateroom doors of the foundering Lusitania in their eagerness to get at U.S. Red Cross nurses. Such films were reportedly shown on hospital ceilings and in rude theaters 90 ft. under the blasts of Verdun. It is hardly surprising that veterans turn up, now & then, who remember dugouts gratefully named Keystone Kottage, Vitagraph Village.

One of the most fashionable women of the time, Irene Castle (when she bobbed her hair, 1,000,000 American women made haste to hang out the shingles of the New Sex), appeared in the Hearst-produced, flag-waving war serial Patria. Another dancer, who took her talents directly into camps, was highbrowed Ruth St. Denis. One of her numbers, called Spirit of Democracy, might serve as a touching, rousing symbol of the whole of entertainment in World War I. It worked up through a lather of militant gestures (bayoneting, grenade-lobbing, etc.) to a disconcerting climax in which a girl in black tatters tottered onto the stage beseeching aid and, after suitable gyrations, flopped dead.

CURRENT & CHOICE

Prelude to War (U.S. Army; TIME, May 31).

The More the Merrier (Jean Arthur, Charles Coburn, Joel McCrea; TIME, May 17).

Inside Fascist Spain (MARCH OF TIME: TIME, May 10).

The Ox-Bow Incident (Henry Fonda; TIME, May 3).

Desert Victory (British Army Film & Photographic Unit; TIME, April 12).

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