The Sky's The Limit (1943)

I haven't posted in over a year.  I'm so damn bored that I've decided to resume this thing, at least for now.  So once again I'm twisting in the wind and have rejoined the innumerable ranks of opinionated assholes with a blog.

There are so many wartime movies that treat the frontline as if it were one big party, full of flag-waving and characters espousing dated American values, so The Sky's The Limit is an oddity:  a wartime musical that is cynical about the war and actually critical about homefront patriotism.

Fred Astaire plays a Flying Tiger on leave who wants to get off the war bond tour he's stuck on and just get laid.  The train he's on stops in the middle of nowhere and he sneaks off.  Astaire did a lonely, middle-of-the-night solo on a train trestle high above a ravine.  This was shot over the course of days, with great expense to the RKO special effects department, but for some reason the scene was cut from the film and is apparently lost.  Too bad, for the insight this gives to the character he plays...dancing high in the air, flanked on either side by a deadly fall, is an effective metaphor and is recalled for his final solo of the film.  The object of his lust is played by Joan Leslie, a young magazine photographer who views the war almost strictly as a career opportunity, begging her editor to put her "where the action is."  Over the course of their brief romance, he hides his true profession, worried that he'd spend the remainder of his leave "telling her all about China."  His character doesn't care, about anything really, for he knows probable death awaits him once his leave is up.  But (of course) he starts to feel true love towards Leslie, and this fills him with what could only be described as anger and bitterness over his precarious situation.  In the end, Leslie finds out who he really is.  The war, which before she had viewed as a chance to further her ambitions, now takes on a whole new meaning.  No flag-waving here.  Near the conclusion, Astaire, in a drunken rage, smashes up a bar (because sugar was rationed, real glass was used, which cut up Astaire's hands and ankles).  One of the only instances where a tap dance was choreographed to express anger;  Astaire's body is like a coiled spring and he lays into the floor like a jackhammer.  This tremendous number is the Johnny Mercer/Harold Arlen classic "One For My Baby", and after Astaire demolishes the place, he toasts the two things that are causing his grief: Leslie and the war..."Make it one for my baby / and one more for the road / that long, long, road."


The film is filled with draft-dodgers, corrupt politicians, incompetent war profiteers.  There is even a scene (which really sours Astaire's mood) where the film's producer hired an actual war widow to tearfully christen a fighter jet...the same kind of jet that malfunctioned and killed her husband.  The film was a modest success, but people didn't get it.  Some critics noticed something "vaguely disturbing" (James Agee in The New Yorker) but ultimately dismissed it as another frothy Astaire musical.  This is clearly an anti-war film, a musical drama.  An intelligent, well acted, very moving film.  This deserves rediscovery.