The View from Pompey's Head (20th Century-Fox), as Hamilton Basso saw it in his bestselling novel of 1954, was a rather unnerving spectacle in which the contemporary South looked like a magnolia tundra strewn with discarded Coke bottles. In the picture version, the view is strictly from the cash register, and the focus scrooches down pretty quickly on the kind of hot grits that generally go with the greens Hollywood loves best.
The hero (Richard Egan), a Southerner who has "lapsed" to New York, is sent back on legal business to his home town, Pompey's Head. On the way, he limbers up his lip for both the accent and the girl (Dana Wynter) he left behind him. The accent Actor Egan never does quite come to isolate, but the girl he gets alone in a hotel room on his first day in town.
When the girl's husband (Cameron Mitchell), a got-rich peckerhead, finds out about that hotel visit, he ravishes his wife, just to even the score. Next day behind a sand dune, Egan has a "soul-shaking experience" with the lady, but Mitchell is victorious in the end. He tells his wife that if she leaves him, she must also leave the old plantation. In the book the plantation was no more than a makeweight for the whole way of life it implied. In the picture it merely looks as if she loves her fun, but oh, that real estate!
Guys and Dolls (Samuel Goldwyn; M-G-M), as a Broadway musical, had all the vulgar swagger of a fink* with his mink at 4 a.m. on the crosstown, and a lot more salt than the lox in Lindy's. It was not really Runyon, just as Runyon was not really Broadway, but as a pinstriped fairy tale with garlic on its breath, it made an honest-to-Gotham hit, and it ran for three years.
Sold to Sam Goldwyn for a record price of $1,000,000, Guys and Dolls is now flung to the cheap seats as a $5.000,000 Hollywood musical. Despite some bad lapses, it is a Sam-dandy of a picture show, a 158-minute blur of unmitigated energy, one of the year's best musicals.
The Hollywood script keeps close to the Broadway book. As the show begins, such assorted knouts, beer-needlers and pete-lousers as Nicely Nicely, Benny Southstreet, Harry the Horse and Angie the Ox are in their customary condition of p.m. panic. "The oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York" is about to sink. Its proprietor, one Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra), cannot raise the rent money for a suitably secluded backroom. Happens, however, he runs into Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando), a curly wolf at all games of chance, and lays the sucker a G he cannot make it to Havana, inside 24 hours, with a doll (Jean Simmons) named Sarah Brown, from the Save-A-Soul Mission.
Sky is accustomed to dolls "wit' nice teeth and no last names," so he makes Miss Brown a straight proposition: in return for her company, he promises to deliver twelve of "the Devil's first-string troops" to prayer meeting come Saturday night. She accepts, but in Havana the track is faster than she expected because Sky puts a hypo in her cow juice. Even so, they are soon lugging in on the preacher for a matrimonial finish.