Sometimes it's the movie and sometimes it's just me. I'm not a fan of musicals but will tune into the ones with notoriety and a name cast to see what I might be missing. This one has one of my favorite actors, Marlon Brando, but he couldn't do the trick for me. Through no fault of his own either; gee, I never saw him sing before and he didn't sound too bad, so at least that was a surprise plus in the picture.
I guess it's just the format with all the song numbers that drags a musical out and this one had plenty of them. If the story behind the picture were reworked into a different genre I would probably feel better about it. You can tell this one came out in an era well before the women's movement came along, because a character like Sky Masterson (Brando) gets to come out with a line stating that 'all dolls are the same'. Done today, he'd be getting a lot of hate mail.
But say, I was impressed by Jean Simmons' right cross when they all got into that brawl later on in the story. That was no girly punch by any means. Her character Sarah Brown seemed to make a better match with Masterson than Vivian Blaine's Adelaide did with Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra). For some reason, Sinatra looked older to me than his actual age of forty at the time, and even though the marriage angle with Adelaide kept getting repeat assurances, I just never caught the chemistry between them.
One other thing I noticed was the story's emphasis on getting twelve sinners for Sergeant Brown's mission, but by the time they had that prayer meeting, a good thirty or more gamblers showed up. I see a wager there after the fact, who would have believed that that many sinners would have come around?
I guess it's just the format with all the song numbers that drags a musical out and this one had plenty of them. If the story behind the picture were reworked into a different genre I would probably feel better about it. You can tell this one came out in an era well before the women's movement came along, because a character like Sky Masterson (Brando) gets to come out with a line stating that 'all dolls are the same'. Done today, he'd be getting a lot of hate mail.
But say, I was impressed by Jean Simmons' right cross when they all got into that brawl later on in the story. That was no girly punch by any means. Her character Sarah Brown seemed to make a better match with Masterson than Vivian Blaine's Adelaide did with Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra). For some reason, Sinatra looked older to me than his actual age of forty at the time, and even though the marriage angle with Adelaide kept getting repeat assurances, I just never caught the chemistry between them.
One other thing I noticed was the story's emphasis on getting twelve sinners for Sergeant Brown's mission, but by the time they had that prayer meeting, a good thirty or more gamblers showed up. I see a wager there after the fact, who would have believed that that many sinners would have come around?