Hit the Deck (1955)

(On Cable TV, June 2020) By itself, there isn’t much that’s strictly wrong about Hit the Deck. It’s about sailors on leave in San Francisco, and their romantic adventures along the way. Three couples means three subplots, several love interest characters involved in show business and with their families involved (some of them including high-ranking naval officers), you can argue that the story is a bit denser than your average musical. But if you’ve seen the crop of the movie musicals, chances are that you’ve already seen a handful of films partially or entirely focused on similar navy themes, from On the Town to Always Fair Weather to Shore Leave and so on. By the time the film ends on a battleship-on-a-stage singing and tap-dancing climax, thoughts of Yankee Doodle Dandy and the climax of Born to Dance are almost inevitable. I still enjoyed the result, but more because of Ann Miller than anything else: She has a substantial role as a woman tired of her six-year engagement to a military officer, and a handful of enjoyable musical numbers in which she gets to sing and tap-dance. There aren’t that many memorable songs, but it’s still a solid film. It’s worth noting the historical context here: 1955 was the beginning of the end for the MGM musical—Arthur Freed was retiring, audiences were getting over MGM’s fantastic 15-year streak that peaked with the late-Freed movies (Singing’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon) and while Hit the Deck may be a wholly average example of the form, it does carry the burden of the form as well—While quite watchable and enjoyable, it’s just nothing special for anyone but Miller fans.

(Second viewing, August 2020) It’s a measure of how average Hit the Deck can be that I had to take another look at it two months later just to make sure I wasn’t misremembering it. But no—it’s still fairly generic, and buoyed only by Ann Miller’s numbers. She does get one good role here as one of the female leads, which is all the better considering that she would retire from the big screen shortly after.