Joe E. Brown was a "Son of a Sailor"; Buster Keaton and Jimmy Durante were "The Dough Boys"; Abbott and Costello were "In the Navy" and "Buck Privates", Martin and Lewis were "At War with the Army", and Bob Hope was "Caught in the Draft". Now, Slick, Sach, and the other Bowery Boys get their turn to turn military discipline upside down, all on account of a bunch of fake sailors who robbed them of charity money. Deciding to enlist to find the culprits, the boys end up on a ship where they create all sorts of chaos for their captain and supervisor (Larry Keating and Allen Kenkins). These boys are so dumb (how dumb are they?) that they think that the entire navy is restricted to this entire ship. Several of them do nothing but run around, pulling up other sailor's shirts, to find the one with the particular tattoo that one of the robbers had.
It's absurd, it's insulting, it's unpatriotic, and it's hysterically funny! Yes, this is one of the Bowery Boys films that actually provides a lot of genuine laughs. In every one of these films, there is a sucker who always ends up getting the pie in the puss, and here it's Jenkins, who manages to be in the wrong place at the wrong time at every turn, ending up soaking wet because of the boy's antics. Leo Gorcey comments, "If they want the ship to be this wet, why don't they just turn the ship upside down?", while swabbing the deck. Te captain asks him why it seems like he effortlessly keeps getting into trouble, to which Gorcey responds, "Oh, it's no effort at all." This is the type of silliness to expect, and it's difficult not to love it.
The ship ends up in Hawaii where they encounter sarong clad Belita, a Dorothy Lamour look-alike. But back in New York, old pal Louis (Bernard Gorcey) encounters the actual thieves and tries to get ahold of the boys. Louis seems to always pop up, no matter where the boys end up, just so he can be an unofficial part of the gang. While most of the Bowery Boy movies focus on bad malapropisms while lamely fighting criminals, "Let's Go Navy!" is one of the best of the series, and certainly the best of their 50's films, which honestly were really bad. It has more laughs than most of their films put together, and features the funniest talking parrot since "The Fuller Brush Girl". A rare winner in the Bowery Boys catalog.
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