Released just days before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, You're in the Army Now anticipated America's entry in World War II and was one of several comedies built around the draft Army that had been recently instated. Abbott and Costello's Buck Privates (1941) and Caught in the Draft (1941), starring Bob Hope, were major hits earlier in the year, and this was Warner Brothers bid to cash in on the trend.

Jimmy Durante and Phil Silvers play a couple of vacuum cleaner salesmen who pop into an Army recruiting station to make what they think will be a quick, easy sale. Through a series of foul-ups and misunderstandings, they accidentally get inducted and land repeatedly in the brig as a result of their hi-jinks.

Durante was already a popular star on the radio and in movie comedies. Phil Silvers came up through vaudeville and the stage and had appeared in a few supporting roles prior to being cast in You're in the Army Now. He proved to be a good team with Durante, but apart from their work in the huge ensemble of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), they never made another movie together.

For the glamour element, the studio cast Jane Wyman, still stuck mostly in blonde ing¿e roles and not the respected dramatic actress she would become after her Oscar® for Johnny Belinda (1948). But this film does give her the distinction of having performed (along with Regis Toomey) what is reported to be the longest screen kiss in movie history - three minutes and five seconds! After the scene was shot, Wyman's husband at the time, Ronald Reagan, went over to Toomey and asked, "How did you get her to sit still that long?"

The backstage stories connected with You're in the Army Now reveal more about Wyman's husband than about her or her co-stars. Marguerite Chapman, who had a small part in the film as part of the Navy Blues singing sextet, was sitting at a table in the Warners commissary with Ronald Reagan one day, discussing their religions. Reagan - already becoming known for some strident conservative political opinions - asked her why she was a Catholic. "I was born one," she replied. "That doesn't mean you have to stay one," he countered. She said she never liked him from that day on. Chapman, who made about 40 films between 1940 and 1960, was asked to audition for the role of the elderly Rose in Titanic (1997), but she was too ill to work and the part went to Gloria Stuart.

Director: Lewis Seiler
Producer: Benjamin Stoloff
Screenplay: Paul Girard Smith, George Bentley
Cinematography: Arthur L. Todd
Editing: Frank Magee
Production Design: Stanley Fleischer
Original Music: Howard Jackson
Cast: Jimmy Durante (Homer "Jeeper" Smith), Phil Silvers (Breezy Jones), Jane Wyman (Bliss Dobson), Regis Toomey (Capt. Joe Radcliffe).
BW-80m.

by Rob Nixon