How often can you say today that all Americans are in the same boat? Except during times of true national crisis, such as the present coronavirus pandemic, which has affected everyone from CEOs to bartenders, most pride themselves on the individualism bequeathed from forebears who preached “don’t tread on me.” The country often seems in thrall to a philosophy that could be boiled down to: You do your thing, and I’ll do mine.
Yet, at certain moments in history, popular culture takes it for granted that Americans have some common experiences, perspectives, and points of reference. From the 1940s through the early 1970s, one particular genre became a go-to favorite of Hollywood studios certain that it would find resonance with the public. The staying power of the so-called “service comedy” — “service,” in this usage, referring to the United States’s armed services — rested on the assumption that enough moviegoers had sufficient contact with the military to relate to farces set in Army barracks or aboard naval ships.
This assumption is in itself touching, a reminder of the vast number of Americans who were themselves veterans of, or had kith and kin who served during, World War II. This helps account for the rash of military-themed movies, books, and plays of the era. Discussing the popularity of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1949 musical South Pacific, whose Broadway opening came close to coinciding with the four-year anniversary of V-E Day, former New York Times critic Frank Rich once observed, “Most of the people sitting in the audience then had relatives who had served in the war or maybe been killed there, and it has a different attitude.”
Of course, the public is almost always receptive to serious treatments of men at war, and the often-tortured homecoming that follows, in the aftermath of a major conflict. Just as World War II gave us Norman Mailer’s novel The Naked and the Dead, the Korean War gave us the novel and film The Manchurian Candidate, and the Vietnam War gave us Michael Herr’s nonfiction chronicle Dispatches.
Yet, in the post-World War II environment, military service was so close to the lived experiences of so many that it could also be the subject of affectionate humor — not pilloried, as in the subsequent satirical novels of Joseph Heller or Kurt Vonnegut, but gently kidded. After all, what one knows well, one is free to have fun with. Witness the rise of such innocuous but revealing cultural products as the comic strip Beetle Bailey or the sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. Both were created by World War II veterans, and both wear their military references lightly; Larry Hagman bounds through episodes of Jeannie in his Air Force blues as though it’s no big deal at all.
Of course, as sad as it is to witness the evaporation of their cultural context, neither Beetle Bailey nor I Dream of Jeannie will ever be mistaken for high comedy. The same cannot be said of the cinematic service comedy genre, which, during its peak period, running approximately from On the Town (1949) through Mister Roberts (1955) and culminating with Operation Petticoat (1959), reflected the best of the old studio system. These stylish, sophisticated comedies presented military life not as a matter of sacrifice but as an entree to fun and games. The wellspring of the genre is surely Fancy Free, the iconic ballet from which On the Town sprang. Brilliantly choreographed by Jerome Robbins, the 1944 ballet offers a trio of sailors navigating not depth charges but the romantic minefield of shore leave.
In some ways, the service comedy can be regarded as a descendant of the prewar Andy Hardy comedies starring Mickey Rooney: It’s a genre that prizes youthful vigor, more often than not revolving around junior officers and impetuous enlistees instead of their older, grayer superiors. At the start of On the Town, for example, a gaggle of sailors, foremost among them Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin, practically fall over each other as they hurry off their vessel in anticipation of a 24-hour sojourn in the Big Apple.
Those snazzy, white uniforms worn by Kelly, Sinatra, and Munshin, which stand out against the blue-gray Manhattan skyline, remind us of the importance of costuming in all genre filmmaking. Just as the cowboy hats worn by John Wayne helped define Westerns, well-tailored, immaculately clean military uniforms represent the chief emblem of service comedies. In Operation Petticoat, when Cary Grant asks Tony Curtis why he joined the Navy, the well-appointed lieutenant junior grade answers: “Because I needed an officer’s uniform.” Like the Astaire-Rogers musicals, the genre is alive to the fun of dressing up and going on the town.
Just as Fancy Free begat On the Town, On the Town led to a wave of movies revolving around carousing military personnel. Foremost among them are All Ashore (1953), a transparent but fun copy of On the Town with Rooney, and the wild and woolly Kiss Them for Me (1957), starring Grant as a naval officer deposited in a sea of romantic prospects, including Jayne Mansfield and Suzy Parker. By this point, moviemakers had discovered the comedic possibilities of juxtaposing by-the-books military men with the inherent disorder of civilian life. Even the saccharine family picture Yours, Mine, and Ours (1968) gets mileage out of contrasting an uptight, undomesticated naval father (Henry Fonda) with his blowsy bride (Lucille Ball).
More important, the silliness of some service comedies signaled to audiences that those who served their country had earned the right to let loose. Fans of South Pacific will recall that the Seabees treated themselves to a Thanksgiving musical comedy revue in the midst of saving Western civilization.
The service comedy survived up to and including Robert Altman’s MASH (1970), which, for all of its sanctimoniousness about war’s savagery, establishes links to its predecessors in its mix of the burlesque and the dead serious, expressed in the droll professionalism of the combat surgeons played by Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland. In her effusive review of the film, New Yorker critic Pauline Kael intuited its heritage when she compared it to an earlier example of the genre, Operation Mad Ball (1957), starring Jack Lemmon.
Stray service comedies resurface from time to time. We should put in a good word for the early ’80s boot-camp comedies Private Benjamin (1980) and Stripes (1981), as well as the hilarious, unambiguously pro-military comedy Hot Shots! (1991), but the genre will never be as vigorous as it once was. When officers turn up in comedies now, such as the Navy midshipman son of Danny Glover’s character in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), it comes as a bit of a shock.
Today, officers and gentlemen are less likely to be found among our friends and family, and thus more difficult to imagine in the zany scenarios presented in the service comedies that once seemed to dominate the screen. Yet, at their best, the genre still does the useful work of reminding us that soldiers are allowed to be more than just heroes.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
