Guys and Dolls

According to current Hollywood theory Cinemascope musicals should be as long as they are wide. Sam Goldwyn has therefore made the Broadway show of Guys and Dolls into a bulky picture running well over two and a half hours. Still, the viewer will leave the theatre limp and happy--but probably not as happy as when he saw the original musical.

The movie version is best when it stays closest to the stage show, which, fortunately, it does much of the time. The book, first pieced together by Abe Burrows and Jo Swerling from some Damon Runyon stories, suffers very little in the transition. It still traces the frantic efforts of Nathan Detroit the manager of "the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York," to find a home for his business activities safe from annoying policemen. Detroit thinks his rent-money problem is solved when he bets one of his customers, Sky Masterson, that Sky cannot take a certain female missionary to Havana. But he only manages to start the romance which every musical must have.

Strangely enough, several of these characters lose part of their whiskey-soaked charm when they make the trip to Hollywood. Strangely, that is, because they are played by some of the best movie actors. Marlon Brando, as Sky Masterson, acts well enough, but his style seems cramped by the good manners the role requires. Moreover, he can not really sing. Frank Sinatra, however, who can, has fairly little opportunity, and his Nathan Detroit comes out much more sullen than worried. Only Vivian Blaine is at her best as a nightclub singer who has been engaged to Detroit for fourteen years. Perhaps significantly, she is the sole star of Guys and Dolls who also played her part on Broadway.

Although some of the actors have let the show down, the film is far from a failure. The Frank Loesser's music is as tuneful as ever, even after the unaccountable omission of two of his best songs, I've Never Been in Love Before and My Time of Day. In their place, he has added a new number called A Woman in Love. His lyrics are literate and amusing.

The best part of the whole film is the choreography of Micheal Kidd. In his final ballet, he transforms a crap game in a sewer into an urgent, exciting tribal ritual that shows Runyon's saints and sinners, the guys and dolls of Broadway, far more clearly than they appear above ground. This dance alone makes the movie worth seeing.