Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly and Jerry the Mouse star in this charming musical mix of live action and animation.

Two sailors (Sinatra and Kelly) in Hollywood looking for glamorous movie starlets find romance, dance with a cartoon mouse and help a young starlet get discovered–all during one shore leave.

“Anchors Aweigh” Trivia (courtesy of IMDb.com)

• For the most famous sequence in the film, Mickey Mouse was originally meant to be the dance partner of Gene Kelly. However, when Walt Disney refused to have his most famous character appear in an MGM film. Kelly turned to MGM’s own animation studio and used Jerry Mouse of Tom and Jerry fame. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, the writer/directors of MGM’s “Tom and Jerry” cartoons, supervised the animation for the sequence. The scene initially didn’t work as the animators had forgotten to add shadows for Jerry’s dances with Kelly. Additional moneys had to be allocated to cover the 10,000 new drawings that would be required.
• It took Frank Sinatra eight weeks to learn the dance routine for the berthing area scene. Ultimately it took 72 takes to get the right footage, though this was probably more down to Gene Kelly’s meticulous need for perfection rather than Sinatra’s inexperience as a dancer. Sinatra later said that he could have made an entire film in eight weeks.
• Although many have said that a longstanding resentment between the two leads was started during this project, there is little to no evidence to suggest this. Quite the opposite, it was this film that started a lasting friendship between Sinatra and Kelly that spawned two other film projects.