Guys and Dolls (1955) - film review

New Yorker Nathan Detroit is struggling to make a dishonest living organising crap games for his gambling-addicted buddies.  Both his fiancée, Miss Adelaide, and arch-nemesis, Lieutenant Brannigan, appear determined to make an honest man of him, but the lure of the dice is too much for him.  Nathan needs a thousand dollars to hire a new venue for his games, so he bets his old friend Sky Masterson that he will not be able to take a girl of his choosing to Havana.  Confident of his success with the ladies and being a keen gambler, Sky readily accepts the wager, only to find that the girl selected by Nathan is a Salvation Army-style missionary, Sarah Brown.  Although the odds are against him, Sky is undeterred and sets about insinuating himself into Sarah’s pure, god-fearing life with his customary brand of deceit and low cunning.  He offers to supply her with a dozen fully paid up sinners to attend a prayer meeting in a weeks’ time if she will only spend a few hours with him in Havana.  Sarah is understandably outraged but has a change of heart when she learns that her mission will be closed down unless she can attract more clients...

A suitably exuberant adaptation of the famous Broadway musical, Guys and Dolls represented a personal triumph for independent film producer Samuel Goldwyn.  With staggering self-assurance, Goldwyn paid an unprecedented one million dollars for the rights to the musical and then spent another five million dollars making the film.  The gamble paid off spectacularly.  The film was an international hit, taking over twenty million dollars at the box office, making this one of Sam Goldwyn’s greatest commercial successes.

Perhaps the bravest (or maddest) decision taken by Goldwyn was to cast Marlon Brando in the lead role.  Brando was hot property at the time, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest actors of his generation, loved by the cinema-going public, yet reviled by the press.  The actor had had no previous experience as a singer but Goldwyn knew instinctively that he was right for the part.  With the sound engineers working overtime, Brando managed to convince audiences that he could sing like a pro, as well as turn in another stunning performance.  

The obvious choice to play the leading role, Frank Sinatra had to content himself with the second role.  Goldwyn had initially been reluctant to cast him at all, but Sinatra was so keen to appear in the film that he relented and found that Ol’ Blue Eyes was the perfect complement to the younger, smoother Brando.  Jean Simmons and Vivian Blaine completed the line-up of lead performers, the former also making a creditable musical début.   

Joseph L. Mankiewicz was an interesting choice to direct the film.  Although a highly regarded director and screenwriter, winning Oscars for A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950), he had not directed a musical and seemed, on the face of it, to be entirely the wrong person to transpose a frenetic Broadway production to the silver screen.  Mankiewicz found the original play superficial and made an attempt to beef up the characters and make them more believable, which conflicted somewhat with Goldwyn’s vision of the film.  In any event, the realism that Mankiewicz sought was totally undermined by the stylised sets, which included an extraordinary dreamlike reinterpretation of New York’s Time Square.  

What could so easily have been a disaster ended up as a major critical and commercial success.  Guys and Dolls proved that not only was there a massive public appetite for glitzy escapism of this kind but that independent film producers such as Sam Goldwyn could hold their own against the studio behemoths.  Jam-packed with some of Frank Loesser’s more sophisticated numbers, including Luck Be a Lady and Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat, this has to be one of the coolest, raciest and most entertaining musicals of all time.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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