Homefront Collection (Irving Berlin's This Is the Army / Thank Your Lucky Stars / Hollywood Canteen)

Warner Bros. Homefront Collectiom - Two thumbs up, one thumb down
I was previously familiar with the three films featured in the "Warner Bros. and the Homefront Collection". My reason for the purchase was to add a high quality DVD set that represented the Warners studio contract players during the height of the studio system. " Thank your Lucky Stars" {particularly Bette Davis singing her wartime lament, "They're Either too Young or too Old") and "Hollywood Canteen" were beautifully transferred to the DVD format. "This is the Army", the only movie in color, was a great disappointment. The picture was lacking in detail and the color was too brightly saturated and inaccurate. Surely, Warners can do better.

Good set of musicals from the WWII era
These are three musical comedies from the WWII era. It's been some time since I've seen "This is the Army". I've seen the other two pretty recently. I intersperse the press releases with my own remarks.

This is the Army (1942)
Press release:
Irving Berlin showed his abiding love for his adopted country with, among other cultural accomplishments, decades of Broadway hits, the unofficial national anthem "God Bless America" and the World War II spirit-lifter This Is the Army. On stage it featured 350 real-life GIs, giving their singing-and- dancing all to raise nearly $2 million (then an astronomical sum) for Army Emergency Relief.
My remarks:
Irving Berlin actually sings in this one - and not too well. According to one story, after Berlin sang "Oh How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning", one stagehand was overheard saying to another, "If the guy who wrote that could've heard how this guy just sang that song, he'd roll over in his grave." I got this story from...

Warner Brothers and the Homefront-A Five Star general!
Briefly issued individually,Warners has brought together three war time classic musicals and put them into one set called "Warner Brothers and the Homefront Collection";"This is The Army","Thank Your Lucky Stars" and "Hollywood Canteen".And you can thank your lucky stars too,as these movies belong in everyone's collections.
"This is the Army",my favourite among the three,raised more than nine million dollars for the Army Emergency relief fund in its' day,while its' stage counterpart of the previous year raised around a cool two million.One heck of a take and with good reason.Irving Berlin's original shows "Yip,Yip Yaphank" back in WW1 and "This is the Army" for WW2 were extraordinarily successful because they struck a chord not only with servicemen but for the families of servicemen also.Both sides of the "fence" so to speak, could relate to the material being performed before their appreciative eyes.Thus the movie,an amalgam of both Berlin show's, brings that same spirit to the...

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