Blood and Sand/Panama Hattie/at War With the Army

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The European grey marketeers who assembled this, as well as many other albums from the soundtracks of Hollywood films, don't seem to have paid any attention to the pairing of different films on a single disc. The combination of Vincente Gomez's Spanish flamenco music for the 1941 remake of Blood and Sand, the much-altered Cole Porter score for the movie version of his show Panama Hattie (1942), and the Mack David/Jerry Livingston songs from the first proper Martin & Lewis comedy At War with the Army (1950) makes no sense, but here it is on one CD. Gomez's quintet plays its half-dozen cuts effectively, with Graciela Parraga joining in on vocals. Since there is no dialogue or any other indication that this music is actually taken from the Blood and Sand soundtrack, it may come from studio recordings. That is certainly not the case with the Panama Hattie material, which clearly comes right off the side of the film stock. This was one of those instances when Hollywood decided to improve upon a Broadway composer. Actually only three songs derive from the stage production -- 'I've Still Got My Health,' 'Fresh as a Daisy,' and 'Let's Be Buddies.' Another Porter song, 'Just One of Those Things,' was interpolated from his 1935 show Jubilee for Lena Horne to sing. The rest of the Panama Hattie songs were not written by Porter, despite what it says on the back cover of the album. 'Hattie from Panama,' 'Good Neighbors,' 'Did I Get Stinkin' at the Club Savoy,' 'The Spring,' and 'The Son of a Gun Who Picks on Uncle Sam' (the last a timely anti-Hitler number) all come from the pens of MGM's Roger Edens and other writers (among them such estimable talents as Walter Donaldson, Burton Lane, and E.Y. Harburg). Ann Sothern makes the most of the romantic songs, and Virginia O'Brien takes care of the funny stuff. But Horne, of course, steals the show. The slight musical material for At War with the Army includes a comic song for Jerry Lewis ('The Navy Gets the Gravy But the Army Gets the Beans') and a romantic Hawaiian-style number for Dean Martin ('Tonda Wanda Hoy'), then the two perform a parody of the movie Going My Way. Interestingly, Martin sounds even more like Bing Crosby when he's trying to sound like himself than he does when he is deliberately imitating his main influence.