Too heavyset to pass the physical exam to get into the army? Have the smarts of a peanut shell minus the nut? Uncle Sam wants you!
The comedy team of Jackie Gleason and Jack Durant star in this Z grade mixture of skits and a nutshell of a plot that could have been a series of forgotten shorts made a decade before. realizing that they have no clients due to the draft, Barbers Gleason and Duran's head off to become involved in military service and end up creating a division of the army that is based on home protection. If they showed up in my town to protect me from invasion and spies, I'd be on the next bus out of there.
Part of this rather short film features harmonica musical numbers with no singing or a drill with Gleason consistently humiliating a little person into being in the back of the troop, and with a little person ends up next to him, he always tells him to get to the back of the troop, forgetting that is exactly where that particular recruit started. Then there's the arrival of nurse Mabel Todd who claims to be engaged to Gleason and accuses him of walking out on her. She is someone whose style of comedy dated very quickly, and at any length passed a few minutes here and there, she is ultra annoying.
Then there is a presence of Florence rice and Bruce Bennett, actors who had either better credits behind them or ahead of them, and they are completely wasted here as the serious romantic team. This film doesn't know what it is trying to be and ends up being an overly talky mess of a comedy that doesn't really show the talented Gleason who had some stage experience at his comic best. Gleason and Durant are obviously no Abbott and Costello or Olsen and Johnson or hoping Crosby, and Gleason would have to go into supporting roles in films and musical reviews on Broadway to really figure out the type of talent that would turn him eventually into the legendary television and musical performer that is beloved today.
