best movie i've ever seen.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

NOTES: Stoll won the Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture. The song "I Fall In Love Too Easily" was also nominated, but the voters preferred "It Might As Well Be Spring", a Rodgers & Hammerstein number from State Fair. The film was also nominated for 3 other Academy Awards including Best Picture (won by Lost Weekend), Best Actor - Gene Kelly (won by Ray Milland for Lost Weekend), and Best Color Cinematography (won by Leon Shamroy for Leave Her To Heaven).MGM's number two crowd-pleaser of the year (second to Valley of Decision) with an initial domestic rental gross of $4½ million. COMMENT: Here's the musical with everything: plenty of songs for Sinatra, some marvelous dances for Kelly, a bit of musical showcasing for Grayson, and a lot of ego-boosting conducting and piano-playing for the eagerly overconfident Mr Iturbi. The songs are delightful, the costumes appealing, the color ravishing - and there's a great support cast including Grady Sutton, Sharon McManus and Jerry Mouse. Kelly and Sinatra are both in fine form but - what is more important - they make an excellent team in what is now seen as a preliminary try-out for Take Me Out To the Ball Game. Unfortunately, what Anchors Aweigh lacks is a Jules Munshin-type comic foil. As it is, the story is too thin to support all the music. And what a pity that - although the film was lensed on the MGM lot - there are no surprise guest appearances.No matter. Kelly's dancing spots are so superbly inventive, they can stand by themselves. After a brisk work-out with Frank Sinatra (no mean high-flyer himself), Kelly partners sad-faced Sharon McManus, then grumpy Jerry Mouse (a zestful blending of live and cartoon action - four minutes of the most memorable moments in movie history) and finally dons Spanish cape for a dazzling solo in which he performs every swing of his own stunt-work. Sidney's direction is reasonably brisk. He tries hard to keep the thin plot moving along, despite the sheer weight of mundane (if reasonably believable) dialogue. In the musical numbers, the direction has polish and even occasionally invention (the under-the-piano shot of a transparent keyboard and the seemingly endless tracking shot of pianos in the Hungarian Rhapsody; the cleverly bizarre angles in Miss Grayson's studio audition). It also has a few deft dramatic moments, e.g. its inspired use of shadows in the sequence with Sinatra following Kelly through the streets.Kathryn Grayson's costumes are nothing short of electri¬fying. Her voice is recorded with more fidelity than usual and comes across particularly well in her "Jealousy" and "Waltz Serenade" numbers.Anchors Aweigh has all the earmarks and lavish production values we expect of an MGM musical. Full marks to the remarkably lush photography by Robert Planck (working in collaboration with Charles Boyle from the Technicolor Company) who can actually be seen standing by his camera in the sound-stage "audition" scenes. This strikingly colorful cinematography was deservedly nominated for an Academy Award. All in all, despite its thin and now dated plot, Anchors Aweigh remains one of MGM's most appealing musicals.

There are some great bits in the film but this is not a good film. They have taken some of the best talent on the MGM lot at its zenith and produced a long, meandering, hugely inconsistent film with no pacing and no plot. The worst offense is....no charm. It is all a huge waste of fabulous production values and many talented contributors. I think a significant part of the lack of charm is the way MGM handled Mr. Sinatra. Frank was not the kind of white bread handsome hunk who gets the girl in an MGM picture. So they have him end up with a more comic or ethnic type better suited to "his kind." They did it in this picture and in several others. Considering Mr. Sinatra's well documented appeal to women, the joke, in the long run, was on Mr. Mayer and his minions.

I will not thumb my nose's at the usually stock Hollywood musicals, not with a combo of Sinatra's mellow show-tunes, Kelly's choreographic moves and Grayson's soprano renditions. Although screenwriter Isobel Lennart does not care a damn of the plausibility in the storytelling, but if you can swallow that, ANCHORS AWEIGH might find its comfy niche in overwhelming its contemporary viewers with its blatantly gaily romance and a cornucopia of vaudevillian assortments.An Oscar BEST PICTURE nominee (5 nominations and 1 win for George Stoll's music score), directed by versatile and prolific Hollywood journeyman George Sidney, my second film from his filmography after SCARAMOUCHE (1952, 6/10), ANCHORS AWEIGH runs approximate 140 minutes, collects an ever-high-octane Gene Kelly (it comes as a big surprise that he had earned only one Oscar nomination through his entire career, which is from this film), third-billed from the opening-credit, who however, splendidly embraces his efflorescence by spearheading as a multifaceted showman in transmitting his vigor and life-force into this otherwise average hedonism burlesque, the highlight surely is Kelly's duo dance with Disney's Jerry Mouse, a technique pioneers the animation-cum-live-action trend, and it is seamlessly dovetailed with utter originality, to which one can barely imagine how audiences could react during its premier over 70 years ago. And what's more relevant to present viewers, now we can realize from where the archetype of Jean Dujardin in THE ARTIST (2011, 8/10) comes and Kelly is much more competent. Sinatra in his incipient thirties, willowy as ever, his character may be flat and dopey, once he sings, one just wonders how miraculous is his slender figure could hone up to a marvelous instrument and produce that voice! Almost the same can be applied for Grayson only if she could veil her obvious contempt every time being addressed as "Auntie Susan". Apart from the triad, among the supporting group is a genial Spanish conductor José Iturbi plays himself, his symphony of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 with a dozen of pianists is a plain grandstanding but also a virtuoso achievement beside the point. And if I haven't perused the credits, I can never suspect that the young boy is Dean Stockwell, his big screen debut, also for Pamela Britton, unfortunately she doesn't even has a name in the film and billed as the girl from Brooklyn.

Date: August.25, 2012 -First Time Watch- On Gene Kelly's hundredth birthday, TCM ran a marathon of his movies and no surprise the three movies Gene starred in alongside Frank Sinatra were featured. I recorded all three and this is the first one I watched and boy what a way to start! This movie is just so sweet. The storyline is average but the way it was executed was fantastic! I couldn't but fall in love with both Gene and Frank. Gene's voice is amazing, especially when he first calls his girlfriend. The phone scene just makes you feel like your own boyfriend would talk to you that sweetly. Then there's Frank. Frank was just adorable! I love how he plays a guy who can't talk to girls when in fact he was with just with about everyone in Hollywood during that time. His sweetness throughout the movie makes you just wish you had a boyfriend like him. I definitely think if I was around during this time I would be a huge Sinatra fan. While this movie is just average, I have to give it extra point simply because of Gene and Frank. I can't wait to watch their other two films! 8/10