Product Description
Like Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938) , 20th Century-Fox’s There’s No Business Like Show Business is a “catalogue” film, its thinnish plot held together by an itinerary of Irving Berlin tunes. The story chronicles some twenty years in the lives of a showbiz family, headed by Dan Dailey and Ethel Merman. Two of the couple’s three grown children – Donald O’Connor and Mitzi Gaynor – carry on the family tradition, while the third, Johnny Ray, decides to become a priest. There are a few tense moments when O’CONNOR falls in love with ambitious chorine Marilyn Monroe and loses all sense of perspective, but the family reunites during a splashy production-number finale. Highlights include Dailey and Merman’s Play a Simple Melody duet, O’CONNOR’s A Man Chases a Girl solo, and Monroe’s tempestuous rendition of Heat Wave (her delivery and stage presence both compensate for her unflattering bare-midriff costume) . Of historical interest, There’s No Business Like Show Business was Fox’s first CinemaScope musical; as such, it is best viewed on TV in “letterbox” formatHal Erickson
