It's the old army once again, this time for the young and naive Robert Walker, much less serious and tragic than he was as the soldier in the same years David O. Selznick epic "Since You Went Away". It seems that for a good portion of his early film career, he was always in uniform, and here, he's a naive young reporter joining the Army hoping to be a correspondent while seeing after duty. While there, he encounters such memorable characters as his sergeant, Chill Wills (pre-Francis the Talking Mule), funny con artist Keenan Wynn and the pretty Donna Reed, long before she became a memorable loose woman on Pearl Harbor in "From Here to Eternity".
There's lots of typical basic training situations going on with Walker finding himself in all sorts of trouble, yet somehow getting out of it in very amusing ways. This film works because it is not going for slapstick and presents a much more realistic view than the military comedies starring comic teams like Abbott and Costello and Laurel and Hardy. Bing's brother Bob, shows up for a brief musical moment, a distraction from the loose plot. But it's a charming story, even if predictable, definitely a product of its time, very patriotic during the last year of the war, and Walker is certainly an enjoyable young actor to watch, long before he began to appear in darker films. This was followed by a sequel as well as the romantic drama "The Clock", starring Walker and Judy Garland, one of the greatest war movies never to go near a military base or a battle zone.
There's lots of typical basic training situations going on with Walker finding himself in all sorts of trouble, yet somehow getting out of it in very amusing ways. This film works because it is not going for slapstick and presents a much more realistic view than the military comedies starring comic teams like Abbott and Costello and Laurel and Hardy. Bing's brother Bob, shows up for a brief musical moment, a distraction from the loose plot. But it's a charming story, even if predictable, definitely a product of its time, very patriotic during the last year of the war, and Walker is certainly an enjoyable young actor to watch, long before he began to appear in darker films. This was followed by a sequel as well as the romantic drama "The Clock", starring Walker and Judy Garland, one of the greatest war movies never to go near a military base or a battle zone.