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Faithful in detail, the picture is false to the original in its feeling. The Broadway production was as intimate as a hotfoot; the Goldwyn movie takes a blowtorch full of Eastman Color and stereophonic sound to get the same reaction. More specifically, a couple of the principals do not quite deliver. Brando as the gambler has a nylon slickness and the right occupational crimp around the eyes. He dances, too, in one wonderful piece of mambo-jumbo, with a kind of animal rapture that moviegoers will want to see more of but he sings in a faraway tenor that sometimes tends to be flat.
Jean Simmons sings sharp, in a voice that is not much better, but she flings herself into Sarah's saturnalia with a pelvic hullabaloo that should make the public forget about her upper register. Vivian Elaine, the only big name held over from the Broadway cast, is just right as the blonde who celebrates her anniversary (14 years engaged) by catching a cold in her Bronxial tubes; and when she screeches Take Back Your Mink ("to from whence it came"), the evening is made. Frank Sinatra, as Nathan Detroit, not only acts as if he can't tell a Greek roll from a bagel; he sings as though his mouth were full of ravioli instead of gefullte fish. Stubby Kaye and B. S. Fully, both from the Broadway cast, suggest best of all the seraphic moldiness of Runyon's ronyons.
As a whole, the show is strong enough to carry its weak parts. It starts with one of the friskiest and funniest ballets ever seen on screen: a sort of midtown montage of pimps and policemen, dips and drabs, teens and touts that comes to a climax in a hilarious antiphony of horse-players as they peruse what Runyon called "the morning bladder." In fact, from first to last—and the last dance is a thrilling choreography, set in a picturesque sewer, of the primordial rite of dice—Michael Kidd has staged his ballets even more effectively than he did on Broadway. Frank Loesser's lyrics are classy, too, whether his music is or not, and Director Joseph Mankiewicz has often made the most of a very good Broadway book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows.
The Tender Trap (M-G-M). "Wow!" says David Wayne. "What a waterhole!" David is on vacation from marriage and the Indiana Pharmaceutical Co., and Frank Sinatra's plushy New York apartment is an ideal deer park. As the fair game begins popping out in all directions, so do David's eyes. A smooth little blonde glides out of the bedroom; she promises to come back soon and bring Frank some fish. Another goldilocks jounces in the door—"to walk the dog," Frank casually explains. An Amazonian brunette, with the look of a lady wrestler in search of a match, wanders in to offer Sinatra a large box of cheese. Also in the field: Celeste Holm, a girl violinist who likes to come over to Frankie's house and fiddle, and a certain Miss Snr (rhymes with fur), who works at the U.N.