Here Comes the Navy (1934)
(On Cable TV, November 2020) Clearly, Here Comes the Navy could not have been made at any other time than 1933-1934, for both obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. From a factual perspective, the film is about a young man enlisting to be a sailor, and serving both on the USS Arizona (destroyed in 1941 during the bomb attack on Pearl Harbor) and then on the dirigible USS Macon (destroyed in 1935 by an accident, bringing an end to the fleet of US Navy rigid dirigibles). For a thematic perspective, we also have a man enlisting for the wrong reasons (romantic revenge!), serving poorly, openly contemplating quitting, and maintaining a somewhat disrespectful attitude toward the service—that kind of script would not have flown during the Production Code years, or the moment the United States contemplated World War II, and especially not when Hollywood decided to become a pure propaganda effort for the American war machine. But since Here Comes the Navy was made just in time, we are left with this somewhat spirited comedy in which James Cagney plays a pugnacious suitor who gets in trouble with a navy officer and, out of spite, joins the service to annoy him and (later) date his sister. This eventually leads him to a court martial, and then two incidents in which his valour is rewarded. All of this was completed with the full cooperation of the Navy, meaning that we get some fanciful but still fascinating look at the operations of a now-sunk warship, and a now-equally sunk dirigible in their heyday. Beyond the historical documentation factor, Cagney is occasionally very amusing in the lead, while Gloria Stuart (yes, that Titanic Gloria Stuart) makes for a bland but effective female lead. Here Comes the Navy is not that funny, but it is amiable and navigates an interesting line between being cynical about the service and upbeat about it. It’s a Pre-Code film in non-obvious ways: not so much given to racy themes, but far more irreverent than you’d expect from something that, at times, does look like the propaganda films of the early 1940s.