This Is the Life (1944)

Watch out Gloria Jean-Susanna Foster has a huge set of pipes on her! Susanna is caught in a wonderful love triangle: her funny, adorable childhood friend Donald O'Connor and the older, mature, handsome army doctor Patric Knowles. To complicate matters, Donald is the object of Peggy Ryan's affections. She claims they've been involved for ages and ages, and when he says they just met the night before, grins and says, "Yeah, but how I've grown up since last night." If you think that's funny, you'll like the rest of This Is the Life.

Chock-full of quips like, "I was out with my girlfriend and her boyfriend, and we ran into his wife," Wanda Tuchock's adaptation of Sinclair Lewis and Fay Wray's play is hilarious. Five minutes don't pass without a laugh, which in the middle of WWII, was no doubt appreciated by audiences. There is some drama to the movie, though, even among the cast. This was filmed before Donald O'Connor was sent overseas, and released while he was fighting to maintain his popularity with American audiences. While it was true that he was able to return and pick right up where he left off, it is a little eerie to watch the movie knowing that the scrawny kid was fighting while we were watching him dance the jitterbug. In the plot, Donald's character is expecting his draft letter any day, and in real life, he was drafted on his eighteenth birthday.

But, to end on a light note, This Is the Life is very funny, as well as sweet and romantic. When Peggy describes her ideal man, Donald quips back, "You don't want a man, you want a shampoo, a massage, and a bottle of horseradish." Check out this teenie-bopper flick; it's one of the good ones.