Film

This Is the Army

Name: This Is the Army
Genre: Comedy, Music, War
Released: 1943
Cast: George Murphy, Joan Leslie, George Tobias, Alan Hale, Charles Butterworth

A 1943 Irving Berlin wartime revue stretched into a feature, following an all-soldier Broadway show staged to raise war-bond money, echoing a real production from the previous war. Expect brassy numbers, corny father-son romance plotting, and actual servicemen singing and dancing in uniform. It's less drama than morale campaign — unapologetically earnest, occasionally startling in its era's blind spots. Best for classic-musical completists and WWII-history buffs.

TMDb rating

5.7

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

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It borrows the exact structure This Is the Army uses — a revue restaging a war through song — but turns every recruiting number into savage irony, showing morale-boosting entertainment from the other side of the trench.

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This documentary series unpacks exactly how and why the Hollywood studio machine that made This Is the Army turned its directors into propagandists, giving you the industrial context behind Berlin's film.

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