Guys and Dolls (1955) is my favorite movie musical. I love so much about it -- the songs, the cast, the costumes, the scenery, and the storyline! But above all, I love the dialog. This musical is based on the short stories of Damon Runyon, particularly his 1933 story "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown." Runyon wrote a distinctive style of dialog that became known as "Runyonese" that is filled with slang, humorously uses long and flowery words at random, and diligently avoids contractions. The dialog for the film embraces Runyonese, with spectacularly funny results.
When I saw this movie for the first time, I was fifteen and had no idea what it was about, what Runyonese was like, nothing. My friend Jesse and I had spent the afternoon painting faces at a Halloween festival, and we stopped to rent a movie on the way back to my place. We both loved old classic movies, and we thought the colorful VHS cover at the video store looked really fun, so we rented it on a complete whim.
We spent the next two and a half hours laughing and laughing and laughing. We both fell in love with all the songs and the crazy dialog and the costumes -- in fact, I watched the movie all over again the next day with my mom and brother before returning it to the video store. And Jesse and I would fangirl over it with great glee for months afterward, whenever we happened to get together.
A few years later, I found a collection of Damon Runyon's stories and read them, and was endlessly delighted to discover that Runyonese is just as funny when you read it as when you hear it.
Guys and Dolls revolves around two romantic pairings: Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra) and Miss Adelaide (Vivian Blaine), and Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando) and Sergeant Sarah Brown (Jean Simmons). Nathan and Adelaide have been engaged for fourteen years, but Sky and Sarah have only just met.
Nathan Detroit needs a thousand dollars to rent a place to hold his famous floating crap game, and he bets Sky Masterson a thousand dollars that Sky cannot take any random woman on a date. Sky takes the bet, Nathan names Sister Sarah as the woman he should take out, and the bulk of the film is about Sky's attempts to convince Sarah he is a repentant sinner who wants her street mission to save his soul, when really he just wants her to fly to Havana with him so he can win the bet. Except that, he starts to fall in love with her for real, which complicates everything.
Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons were not trained singers, but they recorded their own songs for this film anyway. Brando later said that they cobbled his songs together from the multitude of takes they recorded, but Simmons sang well enough she did not need such extreme editing. Neither of them hold a candle to Sinatra, but they do not need to! The unpolished, more realistic sound of their songs adds to their charm. Not only are neither Sky nor Sarah great at singing, neither one has ever been great at this whole falling-in-love thing. But they do so anyway. It totally works.
I have read that Sinatra very much wanted to play Sky Masterson and was so angry that the studio cast Marlon Brando instead, who was not really a singer or a dancer (but WAS hot box office right then), that he refused to speak to Brando most of the time. They spent the bulk of the filming communicating through others. Their characters definitely come across as rivals who like to one-up each other, so the off-screen antagonism does not hurt the film.
One of my favorite parts of the whole movie is the crap game staged as a ballet set in the sewers. Which is not a sentence you will run into very often, am I right? But it works gorgeously, and it involves my favorite song from the film ("Luck be a Lady"). I would link to clips of it here, but it is kind of the climax for the plot, and I do not want to ruin it for anyone here who has decided they want to see the movie for the first time.
I have heard a lot of people saying that Marlon Brando is miscast in this film, and I think that is hogwash. His Sky Masterson is unfairly attractive, all elegant masculinity and effortless cool. There is no reason to wonder why Sarah Brown is drawn to him despite her best intentions not to be. I have always been upset that Brando has never played any other character quite as wonderful, though, admittedly, I have only seen ten of his other films, so perhaps I will stumble on one sometime that I also love him in -- his turn as Mark Antony in the 1953 Julius Caesar is the closest I have found so far.
Random historical tidbit: when Damon Runyon was an up-and-coming New York City reporter, he was mentored by famed western lawman-and-gambler-turned-sportswriter Bat Masterson. It is widely acknowledged that Runyon named his coolest character, a gambler from the west called Sky Masterson, after his mentor.
Is this movie family friendly? Basically, yes. Miss Adelaide is a singer and dancer at a nightclub, and her songs are a little risque both in the lyrics and her costumes (see above). Not racy enough to stop me from watching this movie recently with my kids, who are currently 12, 14, and 16, but some families may find they wish to fast-forward or skip those scenes (you can skip them without missing any part of the plot). There are some kisses and some very mild innuendos in the dialog elsewhere. By today's standards, it is super tame, but for the '50s it was probably almost a little edgy.
You can watch this movie on DVD and Blu-Ray, or stream it on Amazon Prime, YouTube, FreeVee, Tubi, the Roku Channel, and probably other places too -- it is not hard to find.
This has been my contribution to the Seventh Broadway Bound Blogathon hosted by Taking Up Room this weekend! Guys and Dolls was originally a Broadway musical -- according to Wikipedia, it opened on Broadway in 1950, ran for 1200 performances, and won the Tony Award for Best Musical that year!
