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Basically two movies stitched together and both of them made as pure morale boosters for the troops during WWII, Thousands Cheer isn’t half-bad all things considered. In the end it shares a lot in common with Ziegfeld Follies, Cheer is at its best when it moves out of the way of its best and brightest musical stars and just lets them do their thing.
The plot is incredibly thin; the faintest of breezes could totally dismantle it. Frankly, the whole first hour is a little unnecessarily padded. Gene Kelly is a military man who falls in love with Kathryn Grayson, a colonel’s daughter. That’s pretty much the gist of it. And the movie could’ve done without so many musical interludes from Grayson. Sure, her voice is lovely, but she doesn’t seem to understand that an operatic aria is not the same thing as a pop song. The romance takes too long to get going, and once it does, we’ve hit the revue section of the film, which is infinitely better. By cutting down the first hour, we could get the plot out of the way and get to the all-star montage quicker.
The all-star musical parade is also a more dynamic section of the film and plays into the whole “teamwork” ethos that the film expounds upon, however limitedly. Mickey Rooney is our emcee, and he does a fine job. Red Skelton and Frank Morgan’s comedic bits are a bit of dead weight, but Judy Garland belting out “Joint Is Really Jumpin’ Down at Carnegie Hall” ia great, Lena Horne is marvelous in “Honeysuckle Rose,” June Allyson, Gloria DeHaven and deadpan queen Virginia O’Brien do a nice “In a Little Spanish Town,” and Eleanor Powell provides her lone Technicolor dance sequence. Grayson still doesn’t possess much of a presence as an actress, but she’s lovely to look at. And Kelly is great throughout, not quite mastering his later comedic facial reactions, but even this early on he’s athletic and exciting to watch dance. Later day tropes that he would master and make indelible images on the big screen are seen here as well – dancing with props as human stand-ins, early opportunities to showcase his distinctive choreography which combines masculinity with elegance and grace. Thousands Cheer is best when pure spectacle and at its worst when trying to adhere a serious drama to the nonexistent storyline. While it’s uneven, when it’s cooking, it’s a tasty little treat.
