Anchors Aweigh pairs Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly as sailors who stumble across the pleasures of love while on leave in Hollywood. It’s more or less a successful achievement from the grand old days of Technicolor excess, providing ample enjoyable singing and dancing ditties, including the classic number between Kelly and Jerry, Hanna Barbera’s animated mouse.
Having said that, let’s return our sarcastic scowls to our faces and take forceful jabs at what is a simplistic plot that takes on all-too humorous tongue-in-cheek significance in the age of Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. A certain amount of homo-eroticism is too be expected in a film where your main characters are a couple of sexually repressed sailors, but there’s so much innuendo floating around in Anchors Aweigh that picking it out proves to be half the fun.
Joseph (Kelly) is a kind, doe-eyed fellow who would like for his wolfish friend Clarence (Sinatra) to teach him how to score the company of a dame, and there really is no better instructor than the debonair Clarence. The sailors run into a young boy named Donald ( Dean Stockwell) who desires to be in the Navy, and in trying to convince him to return home, they run into the boy’s Aunt Susan (Kathryn Grayson). For the duration of the film, a long series of switched pairings and misunderstandings ensues, where Clarence abandons his woman-hungry demeanour and Joe develops a thicker skin, eventually falling for Brooklyn – not the borough, but a tough waitress.
It seems that every time Joe breaks into a song, people of both sexes swoon. Donald wants to live with Joe in the Navy as the sailors stare at him dreamy-eyed. Actresses on movie lots whistle at Joe's posterior, a posterior that Joe seems to be practically clinging to. While telling Donald’s class how he got his medals, Joe details how he came across Jerry, the mouse, in a kingdom and taught the voracious little rascal how to sing and dance. It’s fascinating stuff, really, watching animated creatures go ballistic at the sight of Kelly’s boyishly attractive looks.
Joe and Clarence’s friendship, described as having a tinge of “strangeness” and an excess of “devotion,” seems to bring Joe nothing but trouble. At one point, Joe says, “When I watch you, I get an idea that something is wrong with me.” Clarence teaches Joe how to pick up girls in a ridiculous, but humorous, scene in which Clarence is perceived to be gay. Joe’s obsession with his friend, and his friend’s excessive displays of masculinity, were surely not intended by the filmmakers as a comment on Joe’s sexual identity, but it is still the film’s most interesting aspect.
Overall, the film’s tone is innocent and there is a handful of very impressive musical numbers, including a soundstage fantasy sequence in which Kelly performs a Spanish tap, and just about all the numbers performed by the great Jose Iturbi.
