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Slip (Leo Gorcey) is your typical problem child, spending his time in
the pool halls rather than in school, spending his money on gambling, and
always ready to get into a fistfight or the like. But Slip is also the
long-lost son of a deceased army general, who has asked his best friend
Col Riker (John Litel) to take care of his boy. And since army people have
always suffered from a significant lack of imagination, the Colonel thinks
taking care of the boy is to send him to military school. Of course, Slip
refuses to go, but is tricked to believing the only alternative would be
reform school, so he joins. At military school, Slip is quickly on
course to become the worst cadet ever, and he doesn't care of course - and
then he learns from a friend from the outside (Bernard Punsly) that he has
only been tricked into joining, so he leaves immediately - or tries to,
because his fellow recrutes under the command of Cadet Major Rollins
(Billy Halop) try to make him stay ... by grabbing his bag and humiliating
him by making him chase after it. The situation eventually culminates with
Rollins falling out of a second storey window, and now Slip feels
responsible (if in all fairness it was an accident and Rollins initiated
it by having all of them play catch the bag). Now Slip wants to
remain in military school, just to make up for what has happened to
Rollins, and he is soon at the top of his class in pretty much every
subject. However, his fellow cadets avoid him, making him (rather than
themselves) responsible for what has happened to Rollins. Only Rollins has
forgiven him, actually. Of course, you know by now where this all leads
to: During a maneuvre, an airplane crashes into the ammonitions depot,
which is to blow up every minute now, but Slip saves one of his fellow
cadet's (Gabriel Dell) life, almost losing his own in the process. But now
he's the celebrated hero of his regiment and is presented a medal for his
bravery! A pretty unsubtle hour-long commercial for the army
that's annoying especially for the messages it transports: That the army
is apparently a solution for everyone's problems, and everybody is prime
army material if only motivated the right way. and the loss of
individuality that comes with it is a good thing, too. And it's actually
ok to trick young men into joining the army. In this respect though, army
recruitment films over the decades (think also An Officer and Gentleman,
Top Gun, Battleship and countless others) have not really
developed any sort of subtlety over the years, the genre seems to be quite
simply refinement-resistant. Back to On Dress Parade though:
Other than the fact that Leo Gorcey brings the sole touch of colour to
this annoyingly straightforward and predictable film, and does the best to
carry it, there really isn't much going on, even the other Dead End
Kids seem to all be cut from the same cloth and do their best to
not show too much individuality - which of course badly hurts their
dynamics as a group, that in other films even borders the anarchic, which
is only another reason why this film is pretty much a bore. Waste of
time, actually.
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