Shipmates Forever (1935)

Shipmates Forever isn’t really a comedy but it was deceptively marketed as one by Warner Bros. It may even have been originally conceived as one. It stars Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler at the peak of their popularity. It has tunes by Warren and Dubin, Dick Powell’s regular providers of hits in his crooning comedies. And there were publicity posters like this:

Somewhere along the line — maybe in the final script delivered by Delmer Dawes, and certainly in the choice of Frank Borzage to direct it — the film became a dreary disciplinary melodrama about Oedipal conflict and idealized military fraternity. It is humorless, stern, and melodramatic, lacking any of the gaiety that one could expect from the Warner Brothers stable — though one should expect heavy melodrama from anything Borzage touched.

It’s such a dour trifle that I really should ignore it, but I’ve been fascinated by it. It’s a very odd film in the comic ecosystem of classical Hollywood. It’s actually unpleasant — and yet it raises an interesting question about comedy in general.

Here’s the nutshell: Dick Melville III (Powell) (what a name!) is the scion of an illustrious family of officers in the U.S. Navy. Dick rejects following the path and has made a successful career for himself as a radio crooner. His father, a retiring admiral (Lewis Stone), heartily disapproves of his son’s decision to be an entertainer instead of heeding the call of duty. He makes his disappointment clear relentlessly, opining that Dick, Jr. isn’t good enough to make it in the Navy anyway. Young Dick takes it as a challenge, passes the requisite examinations, and is accepted by the Naval Academy — all for spite. He is determined to quit after graduation, just to show Dad that he’s wrong. At first standoffish and arrogant, he eventually learns about camaraderie, and does right by the Heavy Father. (There’s also a sacrificial death — it’s Borzage, after all.) Interpolated in this tale of Oedipal shaming and military correction is a romance between June (Keeler) and Dick that is even more tepid than usual for the pair. She’s also down on the Navy because she lost brother and father in combat but she eventually comes around, too. The festive comic conclusion is in this case a graduation ceremony in Annapolis. Powell gets to sing a few songs and Keeler gets to perform a bit of her artless tap. But the main entertainment seems to be footage of warships in regalia.

Shipmates Forever was clearly intended to be a piece of patriotic rah-rah, the Navy version of the more lighthearted Flirtation Walk, made the year before by the same team and featuring West Point. It’s a propaganda puzzle, though, why the film was made when it was. In 1935, there was no war on the horizon, certainly not a naval war. In fact, the military was so peaceful that it was the source of several semi-satirical comedies. It was in the following year that RKO made Follow the Fleet with Astaire and Rogers — which opens with the hilarious Irving Berlin tune “We Saw the Sea,” a complaint by sailors who expected to see the world and instead “saw the sea.”

So what makes any of this interesting? If we accept that it is a comedy of a sort, how does it relate to the other comedies being churned out in mid-30s Hollywood? I think we can place comedies on a certain spectrum. (There are surely others.) At one end are the anarchic comedies, at the other disciplinary comedies. The former affirm unrestrained freedom, the latter freedom through restraint. These poles have existed since comedy was invented. Aristophanes was the Olympian master of anarchy, Moliere of discipline. (Though Moliere’s farces were also anarchic masterpieces.) Shakespeare sort of synthesized them (though by the end of his career, he was tending toward the disciplinary in his problem plays). In Hollywood, we had the anarchy of Duck Soup and Helzapoppin, and the discipline of My Man Godfrey and The Philadelphia Story. Usually, the disciplinary plot is necessary either because characters are excessively free (or motivated by vice) or inflexible (or motivated by distorted good intentions). The correcting force is usually genial and forgiving, all the better to draw everybody into the collective bonheur at the end. There may be Malvolios who can’t be integrated, but they are rarer than one might think.

The discipline of Shipmates Forever is laid on in tranches: it begins with patriarchal shaming and is extended to military conduct. “Entertainment” is stigmatized with a puritanical zeal. And yet… the whole enterprise contradicts the moral. Powell is obviously entertaining and doing service to the Service by the movie we are actually watching. One of the songs Powell performs, “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” became a theme song at Annapolis. Obviously, one doesn’t really have to be in the Navy Band to make Dad accept “entertainment.” The war isn’t even on the horizon so what’s all the fetishizing about?

I read somewhere that neither Borzage nor Powell were happy about having to make Flirtation Walk and Shipmates. It fit neither of their profiles. Perhaps Borzage was given more leeway with Shipmates, given its heavier tone. The only truly funny part of the film for me is the scene when Dick, Jr., in the midst of being hazed by his new uniformed classmates, sings “I’d rather take orders from you” to a group of admiring young ladies. I don’t know whether Warren and Dubin were consciously making fun of the whole shebang but that’s the effect. The song comes off as a cheerful bondage song — it’s clear that Dick Powell and “Dick Melville III” would rather be disciplined by a bevy of babes than by Heavy Dad and his armed force.

Both “I’d Love to Take Orders from You” and “I’d Rather Listen to Your Eyes” were big hits in several versions in ’35 and ’36. Mildred Bailey had a great rendition of the former in ’35.