WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE (1945)

Goofy little Home Front ‘War-Effort’ musical must have been planned as a major release before 20th/FOX saw the war finishing up and downsized to a 1'17" running time.  Why else plump for TechniColor, top tech & producer William Perlberg?  (Rodgers & Hammerstein’s STATE FAIR his other musical that year.)  Why borrow Warners’ Joan Leslie; Paramount’s Fred MacMurray; and pay the price for B’way’s Kurt Weill & Ira Gershwin just off the hugely successful LADY IN THE DARK (on stage ‘43/on film ‘44), with FIREBRAND OF FLORENCE currently running.*  Overnight, why care if MacMurray can’t get past 4-F status & into uniform?  Or that his scrap metal drive turns up a genie who gets him in the Army (George Washington’s!); on a naval ship (Christopher Columbus’s!); or into the Marines (with the WACS!).  Morrie Ryskind, of many a Marx Bros. film, goes for non-sequitur laughs & earns the occasional chuckle, and the cast (other than Gene Sheldon’s overplayed genie) are perfectly pleasant; but it’s wan stuff.  Or is except for one miraculous reel where Weill/Gershwin create a sort of mini-Gilbert & Sullivan operetta on the Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria, in one of the most melodic, rib-tickling, lunatic sung-thru sequences ever put on film.  If only this scene weren’t such a lonely island of wisenheimer musical sophistication among also-ran material.  So, in spite of reasonably solid production values and charming picture-book special effects, you’ll see why utilitarian director Gregory Ratoff was assigned to get it done . . . and get the hell out.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Alas, the film LADY IN THE DARK, while commercially successful, is a travesty of the stage show.  (But check out the hilarious over-sized furniture in a psychiatrist’s office.  Yikes!)  Instead, here’s that Christopher Columbus number.  (HINT: Tap the settings wheel to up the resolution.)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDlBqCW3Z18   And Google away to find superb audio excepts of the magnificent, if doomed FIREBRAND OF FLORENCE, especially the opening number ‘Come to Florence (Civic Song).’