Although, during the Second World War, there were many films that had nothing to do with the war, that including the first of the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies, Hollywood did not want to admit in the films made during the war about that war that the American people were living through the worst of times and that their equilibrium had become unsettled. Sure, you could engage in gallows humor. In one of those movies set in a USO canteen, a sweet young thing answers the question of what she wants to be with the quip “Hitler’s widow!”, a remark greeted with cheers and applause. We would give our all to bring down the Fuhrer. But delving deeply into other than brave emotions was another thing and yet it happened, most notably, I think, in “Music for the Millions”, which begins as one thing and becomes something very different and very disturbing.
Perhaps hoping to capitalize on the success in the previous year, 1943, of a technicolor movie, “Thousands Cheer”, which also starred Jose Iturbi as an orchestra leader who played military camps, that time backed by Kathryn Grayson, who delivers to Gene Kelly the movie’s moral admonition that he had to cooperate with the army into which he had been conscripted just as she, the singer, had to cooperate with the orchestra leader, this time, in a black and white production, Iturbi is also leading an orchestra that plays classical music to military audiences, and has the proposed mission of introducing the higher feelings to people not yet familiar with them. So, at one point, he plays “Clair de Lune” to an anguished orchestra member and she is supposed to take solace from that, and the movie audience learns that they too should take solace from high brow music.
The script for “Music For the Millions” was written, though, by two of the performers in the movie: the young June Allyson, who may have wanted to introduce a woman’s point of view to the material, and so makes it a more realistic portrayal of pregnancy and other aspects of female lives than had been seen in movies, and Jimmy Durante, who plays the orchestra manager and introduces his own brand of vaudeville sentimentality to the concoction. The movie is in on the social changes that have taken place on the home front. Most of the musicians are women, who live together in a boarding house for women only, and Durante announces the medley of names from the variety of American ethnic groups that make up the orchestra because so many men are in the service, and that is why there are so many women in the orchestra. The cab driver who takes the women home to their boarding house is, pointedly, also female. So you get an account of the social change or, at least, what might be taken as a temporary social anomaly to cope with for the duration of the war, along with the classical music.
The plot probes much deeper. The opening shots of the movie are of the pre-teen Margaret O’ Brien arriving at Grand Central Station, her sister, the aforementioned June Allyson, not there to pick her up, and so she has to depend on the kindness of strangers to help her out, which means to get her to the symphony hall where her sister is a member of Iturbi’s orchestra. Margaret O’Brien is so cute and appealing and she delivers her lines in that carefully enunciated, slow, and sincere delivery that would bring tears to her recitation of the alphabet. Over the next few scenes, the outcome telegraphed, it turns out that her sister is pregnant by a husband off at war. O’Brien brings a chair to the stage in the midst of a performance so that her sister can sit down. Politeness to pregnant women who are holding down jobs is clearly not yet a custom, nor apparently is it proper to discuss such matters with young girls. In delivering the chair, the O’Brien character is embarrassing herself by showing her priorities as well as by breaking onto the stage from the wings. But Iturbi sems to approve and so the audience learns that such a straightforward display of concern for an older sister is appropriate.
The women orchestra members stash the young sister at the boarding house and one gets a sense of what it is like for women to live together, that they are all respectable made clear by the fact that the audience sees June Allyson in her slip but nothing less. All the women are kind to one another, very different from the snooty high class women in “The Women”, from 1938, except for one lapse when one of the young women raises her voice and everybody notices that. That is occasioned by a secret the young women are keeping from June Allyson: her husband is missing in action and they don’t want her to see the telegram that provides that information, so as to spare her until she is further along in her pregnancy and also in the hope that the bad news will turn out to be nothing, which seems very odd to a non World War II mentality, which would expect bad news to be passed on, nobody (except the Japanese) to blame for dead soldiers in the Pacific, the women instead engaging in the superstitious process whereby bad news unannounced has not yet happened. Everybody cooperates in this unnecessary and melodramatic act for the good of the pregnant lady, but really to service their own senses of vulnerability to the vicissitudes of war.
To make matters worse, the young women recruit a ne’er do well uncle, a thief more in jail than out, to forge a letter that the soldier is alright, just delayed in his correspondence. The role is played by Hugh Herbert, familiar from “Gold Diggers of 1935” as the inept, tongue tied, preoccupied, bumbler. That time he was more interested in his snuff collection than in his rich fiance. This time he just wants to mooch money from his female relative but agrees to do the dirty deed, which seems misbegotten and even cowardly, though it is meant to spare the pregnant girl’s feelings, even as so many other women are receiving word that their loved one has been hurt or killed or is missing. Oh, were bad news so easily delayed!
While this is going on, Jimmy Durante, who has done part of his own low brow nightclub act to entertain the troops while Iturbi enjoys his dinner, sits down for a heart to heart talk with Margaret O'Brien in a church and they both engage in the non-aesopian, euphemistic language of conventional imagery to try to talk around the truth of the matter. O’Brien agrees that storks bring babies (isn’t it cute that she is innocent of the knowledge of sex!) but she does wonder why babies are delivered to hospitals, and Durante answers that hospitals are like landing fields because storks have wings and so have to land like planes. So the audience will feel pleased that Durante has found a way to bury the issue of birth, even though that is what is awaiting her sister, in some pleasing and evasive formula.
To round out the story, a letter is received by June Allyson which everyone assumes was forged by Hugh Herbert and so everybody feels satisfied, except it turns out that Herbert had neglected to send a forged letter and so everyone immediately realizes that it was a real letter, that the father of the baby is alright, and there is June Allyson holding her just delivered baby, all the fairy tales confirmed. Finis.
Is this really the sort of comfort that a person watching this movie at the time would want to receive if their loved ones were fighting abroad? What is offered are the temptations of denial in the hope that things will turn out alright in spite of the evidence to the contrary. Worse still is that what allows for hope is that the point of view of a naive pre-teen is given the appearance of wisdom rather than being mere foolishness. The audience allows itself, for a moment, to believe that finding a euphemism is an adequate form of thought that supports a sense of security not otherwise earned. The mind is eaten away through its quest for platitudes. “Music for the Millions” would indicate that America was suffering from what has been called “a failure of nerve”, as that refers to a nation losing its resolve and belief in itself during a war.
This film, however, is quite different from other World War II movies that take place on the home front, such as “Mrs. Miniver” (the English home front) or, deep into the war, “Since You Went Away”, in which an American officer on leave talks to the wife of his friend who is serving overseas. The two talk through most of the night in a conforting and loving way without him ever making a pass at her, another example where how you handle sex is taken to be a matter of character. Most World War II movies feature stoicism and heroism, while “Music for the Millions” does not, perhaps an indication that the nation was by this time a bit war weary, FDR always conscious of the fact that one of his priorities was to keep the American people engaged with the war lest they press for a premature negotiated settlement. And it should be remembered that this movie takes place at the time of D-Day which saw casualty rates soar and stay that way until near the very end of the war a year later.
It should also be said that Cold War movies made during the Cold War were not like World War II movies. They were neither stoic nor filled with emotional platitudes. Rather, they faced the possibility of nuclear annihilation, whether through the farce of “Dr. Strangelove” or the melodrama of “Fail-Safe”. My supposition is that where “Music for the Millions” went wrong was in its attempt to carry out the overall mandate of the time that high culture and popular culture could be merged. That meant not only that popular taste would be elevated by being exposed to classical music, a point made a decade later when a Doris Lessing Communist thinks that the workers should read Tolstoy. It also means that the tastes of the masses and their emotions are also worthy of respect. Don’t abuse the feelings of the masses. That is a leitmotif of democratic debate and remains alive and well today when we are all asked to understand why people in the flyover states feel the way they do about the people in the coastal states, as if it doesn’t matter that the views they have of immigration in particular and politics in general are pretty vile. There is always no lack of excuses for absences of thought or for bad feelings.