For Me and My Gal

FOR ME AND MY GAL   **1/2

Busby Berkeley

1942

IDEA:  Vaudeville stars Jo and Harry fall for each other during the onset of World War I, but when Harry receives his draft notice their personal and professional partnership is put in jeopardy.

BLURB:  Even by the standards of the more middling Golden Age Hollywood musicals, which are surely more abundant than the exceptional ones, For Me and My Gal doesn’t inspire much excitement. Berkeley’s trademark large-scale dance choreography is nowhere to be found, while Gene Kelly, in his screen debut, is afforded scarce opportunity to show off the virtuosic footwork for which he would soon become renowned. If one adjusts their attitude toward the film, understanding it as more of a romantic melodrama with some music than a musical with some romance, For Me and My Gal delivers a degree of satisfaction, albeit on still fairly routine terms. Berkeley puts his troubled lovers, played by Kelly and Judy Garland in their first of three film pairings, through a familiar, sentimental romance-torn-by-war scenario. The war threatens not only their love and courtship, but, in the fashion of a backstage musical, their work as performers. How will anyone survive without show business? They won’t and can’t, the film suggests, as the need for uplift in hard times is manifested as a patriotic demand for mass entertainment. Hilariously, For Me and My Gal substitutes World War I for the (then) ongoing World War II, flouting all the obvious geopolitical differences for the direct purpose of morale-boosting propaganda. Against the clunky, the silly, and the trite, Kelly and Garland remind us of the simple power of convincing onscreen chemistry.