Three for the Show (1955)

User Rating:

6.0/10   

Director:

H.C. Potter

Writers:

Edward Hope (writer)
W. Somerset Maugham (play)

Release Date:

24 February 1955 (USA)

Genre:

Musical

Tagline:

LET'S GO! TO THE YEAR'S TOP MUSICAL SHOW! (original print ad - all caps)

Plot Keywords:

Remake | Based On Play

Cast

Betty Grable	...	Julie Lowndes
Marge Champion	...	Gwen Howard
Gower Champion	...	Vernon Lowndes
Jack Lemmon	...	Martin 'Marty' Stewart
Myron McCormick	...	Mike Hudson

Also Known As:

The Pleasure Is All Mine (USA) (working title)

Runtime:

USA:93 min | USA:88 min (TCM print)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Finland:K-16 | Sweden:Btl

Company:

Columbia Pictures Corporation

Trivia:

Jack Cole, the legendary dance director famous for staging Rita Hayward's striptease in Gilda (1946) also taught Marilyn Monroe's her moves in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," "How to Marry a Millionaire" and "Some Like It Hot." Credited as the choreographer of this film, his attempt to turn 39 year old Betty Grable into another Marilyn is not very successful. The co-star of the film, Gower Champion, who is not credited for any of the dances, went on to become a famous Broadway choreographer and director in his own right.

Movie Connections:

Remake of Too Many Husbands (1940)

Soundtrack:

Down Boy

Mid-Fifties desperation

Musicals are dying, you're Harry Cohn, you have all those expensive sound stages and wide-screen cameras lying around... what do you do? He remade one of Columbia's not-first-rate-to-begin-with screwball comedies, "Too Many Husbands," outfitted as a very splashy and very insubstantial musical with an oddball cast. Good it's certainly not, but for students of the evolution of the '50s musical, it's interesting. Betty Grable, legs as spectacular as ever, has married Gower Champion when first husband Jack Lemmon, thought dead in the war, returns. It's a standard plot, silly and overstaged, with Lemmon and Gower throwing a lot of fake punches at each other. But the filmmakers do try to retrofit it in musical ways. The score, mostly Gershwin standards, isn't well sung, and Grable and Lemmon are a terrible match -- she just seems too much woman for him, and she was nearly a decade his senior. But he does warble passably and even dances and tickles the ivories a little. Most striking are a couple of extended, wordless sequences, not exactly dancing and not exactly not, but choreographed, to classical chestnuts: They show the makers' desperation at trying to do something, anything, new, to keep musicals alive. Marge Champion, not a singer, surprisingly has to sing a lot. She and Gower have the best sequence, a falling-in-love pas de deux filmed practically in one take, like the good old Fred and Ginger duets. But the movie feels underpopulated -- these four and Myron McCormick, as an unappealingly avaricious agent, are practically the whole cast -- and Gower, though lean and graceful, looks impatient to jump out of the Cinemascope frame and go direct.