For some reason I've never seen this movie on television though it's reasonable to assume it's been shown over the years so when it surfaced as part of an 8 Fox Musicals boxed set at a silly price (£30, which works out at £3.75 a throw) I snapped it up, especially since 1) it was selling elsewhere at £50 and 2) out of 8 titles I only owned one (Daddy Longlegs). You can't copyright a title, of course, and this was the third movie since 1939 (the second appeared in 1941) called The Gang's All Here and since the other two seem to have sunk without trace this is probably the most substantial. I doubt if anyone went to see this, either at the time or subsequently, looking for a solid plot; chances are they went to see Alice Faye who was just about to abdicate as 'Queen' of the Fox lot, and hear the score though in 1943 they wouldn't necessarily have been aware of Harry Warren and Leo Robin. What Faye did was warmth - as opposed to glamor laced with cynicism (Betty Grable, her immediate successor as 'Queen') or dumb (Marilyn Monroe, who succeeded Grable) - which is not to say she was chopped liver, in fact she was lovely rather than beautiful and the warmth embraced not only her personality but also her voice which she put to good use in her nine-year musical career at Fox during which time she introduced 23 'hits', in fact in the same year (1943) as The Gang's All Here she had already introduced another Harry Warren hit song, You'll Never Know in Hello, Frisco, Hello, a song which, of course, went on to win the Best Song Oscar. She supplemented 'Know' with two more fine ballads in this movie, A Journey To A Star and No Love, No Nothing and the score also included Paducah, Minnie's In The Money - a solo vocal for Benny Goodman? and two typical Busby Berkeley Production Numbers, Carmen Miranda's The Lady In The Tutti-Frutti Hat and Faye's Polka-Dot Polka in which everyone joined in as a grand finale. June Haver popped up as a hat-check girl and Jeanne Crain had one line but the support included - apart from Benny Goodman and his band - Charlotte Greenwood, Eugene Palette and Edward Everett Horton all of whom contributed to a pleasant diversion. Faye, who was pregnant at the time, made one more film two years later, it was a 'straight' role in Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel and in the wake of what she considered Darrell Zanuck's inept editing of what Faye herself considered a fine acting performance she retired from the screen resurfacing some twenty years later in the remake of State Fair. As swan songs go The Gang's All Here isn't bad at all.
Review of The Gang's All Here
