The West Point Story On DVD, Comedy, James Cagney, Virginia Mayo

Description:

A Broadway director helps the West Point cadets put on a show, aided by two lovely ladies and assorted complications.

Actors: James Cagney, Virginia Mayo, Doris Day

Year Of Release: 1950

Running Time: 107 minutes   Black & White 

Language : English

(Manufactured On Demand , Region 0.)

This DVD will play in DVD players worldwide 

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Testimonial:

. but just forget that and have fun with it. Cagney is Elwin "Bix" Bixby who is a washed up Broadway director, not because he is bad at his job, but because he crossed producer Eberhart (Roland Winters) by getting dancer/singer Jan Wilson (Doris Day) out of the chorus where he felt she was misused, and into a Hollywood contract by teaching her everything he knew.

Bix has a chance to square things with Eberhart and his increasingly impatient fiancée (Virginia Mayo as Eve) by taking a job at West Point directing a show written by Eberhart's nephew, cadet Tom Fletcher (Gordon McRae). What Eberhart really wants is his nephew to leave the army and go on Broadway, where he feels his talents won't be wasted. Bix takes the job, and is soon agreeing with Eberhart's assessment - Tom has the looks, can sing, dance AND wrote the show. Bix can't figure why Tom wants to work for minor duckets in the Army when he could clean up and be famous on Broadway. Why doesn't he just quit West Point? Now Bix is not a bad guy. He's got great courage, he just has a problem with rules, doesn't quite get the concept of camaraderie, and he has an unruly temperament - would you expect less from a Cagney role? Bix just doesn't get these cadets only showing up for rehearsal when their classes and the academy rules permit it, and then one day he punches a cadet and is out of a job UNLESS he becomes a cadet, living the life a cadet along with the uniform, the haircut, and the plebe status. At this point Bix's war record is brought up. Like I said before he had great courage, even saving his platoon in Italy in WWII, but he went AWOL so many times that if this film was true to life he'd actually be in Leavenworth turning big rocks into little ones. This is one of many times you are just going to have to suspend your beliefs.

How does Doris Day figure into all of this? Well it turns out Day, as the girl Bix rescued from the chorus line years ago, is in town, so Bix gets permission to try and get her to come to West Point for an appearance AND he tries to talk her into being the princess in the play. If not they are stuck with Alan Hale Jr. as the princess and romantic lead to Gordon McRae's character. There is only so much suspension of belief that an audience can take! All of this is just a chance for Bix to learn the importance of rules and teamwork he never learned in the war, for some patriotic numbers and speeches that didn't do a movie studio any harm in 1950 in the age of HUAC, and for Warner Brothers to "pass the baton" as you might say to their new generation of singers and dancers, embodied by McRae and Doris Day. Don't worry though, there is enough of Cagney's great dancing to satisfy.

The weirdest thing for me - seeing Cagney and Mayo play a rather functional couple after seeing them together in 1949's White Heat where they had the kind of love life you would expect between a psychopath and a gun moll with wandering eyes.