Guys and Dolls Blu-ray Review
Who cares if Garbo talks? Brando sings!
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, November 2, 2012
The Broadway musical has been defined by a number of iconic duos who together offered scores filled with brilliant
material, many of which helped define The Great American Songbook from the twenties through the sixties (and maybe
just a tad into the
seventies). Kern and
Hammerstein, the Gershwin brothers, Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Adler and Ross,
Bock and Harnick and Kander and Ebb are just a few of the many legendary pairs who have offered audiences huge hits
(and the occasional flop), creating some of the most beloved works in the history of American theater. "One stop
shopping" creators who forged both the music and lyrics for their shows are a relatively rare breed, and if asked, most
people could probably only come up with a couple writers who filled this double bill: Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim
(though Sondheim of course famously paired at various times with Leonard Bernstein, Jule Styne and Richard Rodgers).
But there are at least a few others, including
The Music Man's Meredith Willson and a man who helped inspire
Willson to write that musical, Frank Loesser. Loesser, like Willson, had achieved quite a bit of success in Hollywood
before he attempted to write for Broadway (ironically the exact opposite trajectory that most of the iconic writers of the
thirties and early forties took). Loesser's first musical,
Where's Charley?, a musicalization of the venerable farce
Charley's Aunt, was a major hit and a career high for Ray Bolger, as well as producing the standard "Once in
Love With Amy". Two years later Loesser created what is one of the greatest musicals ever written,
Guys and
Dolls, which became a major smash (helping to give a major shot in the arm to the career of Robert Alda—Alan's
father—in
the process).
Guys and Dolls might not seem like the sort of thing that would take Broadway by storm. It was
based on the highly stylized writing of Damon Runyon, writing that includes dialogue that is artificial, to say the least
(note how many of the characters use no contractions).
Runyon's characters were also not exactly paradigms of honor (at least for the most part), meaning that several of the
key players in
Guys and Dolls' story had questionable backgrounds and motives.
Before we actually get to an actual discussion about
Guys and Dolls I'd like to beg your collective forbearance in
order to spend just a minute discussing one of the major malapropisms that many people use without even thinking
about
it, a malapropism that is in fact tied at least somewhat to the popularity of Broadway musicals. There are two elements
to
a song, the music and the lyric—yes, lyric, as in singular. Why is it that so many people use the incorrect form "lyrics" in
describing the words to just one song? If you look back at old sheet music, quite often it would simply state
"
Words and Music
by" without even using the term "lyric" in either the singular or plural form. But when musicals started becoming
popular,
the mastheads and, later, song folios and ultimately cast recordings stated "Music and Lyrics by" because musicals had
more than one song, hence more than one lyric. Somehow that verbiage, perhaps due to being impressed
upon
the mass market through musical films where it was also employed, came to be used for even individual songs. (This is
somewhat of a generalization, as "lyrics" was used incorrectly even in the veritable days of yore.) Okay, end
of rant and we'll segue by stating the Frank Loesser wrote both the music and lyrics for
Guys and Dolls, as he
had
done with
Where's Charley? and would go on to do with
The Most Happy Fella and his Pulitzer Prize
winning
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. (It's worth noting that
Guys and Dolls itself
was slated to win the Pulitzer Prize, but wariness over book writer Abe Burrows' problems with the House Un-American
Activities Committee put the kibosh on the award actually being given to the musical.)
There are two main couples in
Guys and Dolls. The first consists of Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra), famous for
running a floating crap game, and his longtime fiancée Adelaide (Vivian Blaine, recreating her iconic role from the
Broadway production), a showgirl with a perpetual post nasal drip resulting from never being able to get Nathan to the
altar. The second couple includes Nathan's gambling buddy (and kind of nemesis) Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando), from
whom Nathan is attempting none too successfully to extract $1000 to help him fund a new site for the crap game. After
a couple of failed attempts to trick Sky into betting the money, Nathan finally hits on a winning gambit by betting Sky he
won't be able to take local Salvation Army worker Sarah Brown (Jean Simmons) to dinner in Havana, Cuba. Sky in turn
makes a deal of sorts with Sarah that he can fill her empty Salvation Army "saving station" (with his coterie of small time
hoods and gamblers) if she goes out to dinner with him.
The bulk of the musical then plays out with regard to two or three salient questions: will Nathan
finally marry
Adelaide and will Sky manage to win the bet without seriously offending Sarah in the process (especially if she finds out
—and guess whether or not she does—that she's part of a wager)? The allure of
Guys and Dolls really isn't that
much in terms of the plot, which is fairly by the numbers, but much more in terms of the incredibly colorful characters.
Many people are on record stating they feel Brando was badly miscast in this film, or at the very least should have
traded roles with Sinatra, but he actually does quite well and sings acceptably well, including one of the show's big hits
"Luck Be a Lady Tonight". Sinatra is also quite winning, as is Simmons, but the film is owned lock, stock and barrel by
two actors recreating their original Broadway performances. The effervescent Stubby Kaye is a wonderfully funny
Nicely-Nicely Johnson, an inveterate follower of the horse races who is one of Nathan's main aides. Kaye gets two of
the musical's showstoppers, "Fugue for Tinhorns" and "Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat". But perhaps even better
than Kaye is the absolutely perfect Vivian Blaine, an actress who is chiefly remembered, and rightly so, for this incredible
role. Blaine never really took off as a motion picture actress, despite some notable appearances, and
Guys and
Dolls is important if for no other reason than that it memorialized one of the greatest musical comedy portrayals of
all time. (I got to see Blaine in a touring company production of the Kander-Ebb musical
Zorba when I was a
little boy, and I can state she had lost none of her glamour and belting vocal abilities later in life.)
Guys and Dolls is also proof positive that the legendary Joseph L. Mankiewicz never met a genre he couldn't
conquer, apparently quite easily. This is one of the smoothest stage to screen adaptations despite the sad jettisoning
of several of Loesser's great songs (including rather oddly one of the show's biggest hits, "A Bushel and a Peck").
Mankiewicz obviously worked closely with choreographer Michael Kidd to deliver some really beautifully staged dance
sequences (including the fantastic opening "Runyonland" number), but more importantly he was able to carefully toe
the line between the source material's inherent whimsy and a more intimate, putatively more realistic, style that the
medium of film often requires.
Guys and Dolls is a big, splashy and frankly at times unabashedly silly musical,
but it's one of the undeniable highlights of fifties' musicals.
