This patriotic wartime morale-booster was written by Paul Jarrico and Richard Collins. Both were later blacklisted for their supposed Un-American activities.
Notable as the first film to feature a bona fide solo choreographed and performed by Gene Kelly, the celebrated 'mop dance' to "Let Me Call You Sweetheart." This number would lead to Columbia borrowing Kelly from M-G-M the following year for Cover Girl (1944), on which he was given a free hand to choreograph -not because Harry Cohn believed in him as much as Columbia didn't have any dance directors of note. Kelly was happy to stage the numbers at bargain basement prices as a means of showing the executives at M-G-M what he could do. The ruse paid off, and Kelly was promoted to full-fledged choreographer as soon as he returned to his home studio.
Both Eleanor Powell's boogie woogie routine and Lena Horne's rendition of "Honeysuckle Rose" were interpolated into Thousands Cheer (1943) when MGM abandoned its production of "Broadway Melody of 1943" before it was completed. Ironically, that aborted project was to have co-starred Powell and Gene Kelly, both of whom appear in Thousands Cheer (1943) but not together.
First color film of Kathryn Grayson, Mary Astor, John Boles, Eleanor Powell, Mickey Rooney, Ann Sothern, Donna Reed, José Iturbi', Margaret O'Brien, Lena Horne, Bob Crosby, Kay Kyser, and just about everyone else who had not appeared previously in either Best Foot Forward (1943) or Du Barry Was a Lady (1943).
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