A Blog About Women Who Were Homefront Heroines: the WAVES of World War II
One last post to end our series on the film Here Come the WAVES.
We’ll leave you with a quote from the film, an exchange between Rosemary and Susan, twin sisters both played by actress Betty Hutton.
Susan: Only I wish… I wish…
Roemary: What?
Roemary: I wish that I had been born twelve minutes earlier than you, and I’d have had all the brains.
And if you have some time this Sunday, check out the full film, below.
Here Come the WAVES was nominated for one Oscar, for best music original song Accentuate the Positive. The song was written by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer.
It didn’t win. It Might as Well be Spring from the Rogers and Hammerstein musical State Fair took the award that year.
Here’s a version of the song (not from the film), sung by Bing Crosby and the Andrew Sisters.
Here Come the WAVES was released worldwide, including in Sweden (Flottans farliga flickor, November 1945), Finland (Laivaston heilat, December 1946), Turkey (Gönüllü melekler, 1947), Denmark (En rigtig sailor, August 1947), and Portugal (A Tentação da Sereia, May 1949).
The poster above is from the Argentinian version of the film, known as Mellizas Peligrosas, or Dangerous Twins. The poster below from the Denmark release, which translates as A Real Sailor.
Betty Hutton, star of Here Come the WAVES, in an advertisement timed to coincide with the theatrical release of the film in December 1944.
The theatrical poster for the film Here Come the WAVES, filmed in cooperation with the US Navy and released in December 1944.
And look what we found on the other side of the December, 1944 WAVES Newsletter. An ad for the new film Here Come the WAVES.
The Betty Hutton/Bing Crosby vehicle was filmed on Navy bases and at the Hunter College Boot Camp. It went into pre-release at Navy facilities across the United States before going into theatrical release December 18, 1944.
Here Come the WAVES previewed at the WAVES boot camp training facility at Hunter College and at the Naval Air Station in San Diego before the film’s premiere in New York City. The reason? The film was shot on location at the two facilities (as seen in the film still above) with WAVES acting as extras.
Publicity poster for the Hollywood feature film Here Comes the WAVES, which premiered Christmas week, 1944.
It was Christmas week, 1944, that the feature film Here Come the WAVES (film still above) premiered in New York, but WAVES got a sneak peek before the premiere.
The film features Betty Hutton, playing twin sisters who join the WAVES, and Bing Crosby, as the celebrity who joins the Navy in order to help the war effort.
The Frank Capra classic was released in 1946, the year after the war ended. But World War II plays a big theme in the film – the Jimmy Stewart character can’t go to war because of a childhood injury, but his brother does and becomes a war hero.
Hinges of History 