The More We Get Together No. 2
1944 · 9m · Canada
Tones: theatrical, whimsical
A male quartet performs rousing renditions of Billy Boy, What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor, and Marching through Georgia.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1944 male quartet singing sea shanties and Civil War marches sounds like the safest possible film, but there's something genuinely unhinged about the commitment to pure theatrical earnestness that almost loops back around to subversive—I just wish I could figure out if that's intentional or if the film is too sincere for its own good.
This sits perfectly in the National Film Board's mid-century tradition of pedagogical entertainment, where formal constraint (four voices, three songs, nine minutes) becomes a kind of compositional discipline—the whimsy isn't a bug, it's the film's awareness of its own role in the musical short repertoire.
The entire architecture hinges on whether those four voices actually lock together in a way that justifies the close framing; if the blend is right, the harmony becomes the film's real subject rather than the novelty songs, and suddenly you're watching something about collaborative precision on a shoestring.