Intro: Guys and Dolls (1955)

Hi, I'm Harry Marks and this is Let's All Go to the Lobby—your introduction to the film you're about to watch. We're kicking off a week of movie musicals with Joseph Mankiewicz's 1955 adaptation of Frank Loesser's Broadway hit, GUYS AND DOLLS.

The film stars Frank Sinatra as Nathan Detroit, looking for a secret spot to hold his underground craps game without the police finding out. Well he finds it, but he needs a thousand dollars to lock it in—money he doesn't have. So he bets Marlon Brando's Sky Masterson that Sky cannot take a woman of Nathan's choosing to Havana Cuba for dinner.

And who does he choose? None other than Sister Sarah Brown of the Save a Soul mission—played by Jean Simmons.

Despite GUYS AND DOLLS's light atmosphere, production was anything but. Sinatra and Brando notoriously did not get along. Sinatra had originally wanted to play the lead part of Masterson and hated Brando for getting it. As a result, Sinatra sometimes referred to Brando by the nickname "Mumbles" on-set.

He then incorporated Masterson's big number, "Luck Be a Lady," into his stage act and recordings, making it his own.

Speaking of coveted parts, Gene Kelly desperately wanted to play Masterson as well, but MGM wouldn't loan him out to producer Samuel Goldwyn. Kelly resented MGM for it and was later quoted as saying, "I was born to play Sky Masterson like Clark Gable was born to play Rhett Butler."

To make matters worse, the film was ultimately distributed by MGM anyway.

And while we're on the topic of actors who almost got the role, Goldwyn lobbied for the part of Sister Sarah to go to Grace Kelly. Simmons was actually third in line, but he ended up liking her performance so much that he felt she was able to sell her love for Sky in a way that translated better on film than it had onstage.

There are a few notable differences between the Broadway show and the movie, most noticeably the absence and addition of several musical numbers. Songs like "Marry the Man Today," "A Bushel and a Peck," and "More I Cannot Wish You," were cut, while Frank Loesser wrote three new numbers for the film: "(Your Eyes are the Eyes of) A Woman In Love," "Pet Me Poppa," and "Adelaide," the last of which was written just for Sinatra.

Brando sung all of his own songs and underwent vocal training in order to record them for the film, but could never finish a track in a single take. All of his performances are stitched together from hours of separate takes. In fact, Brando hated the way he sounded, saying his voice sounded like quote "the mating call of a yak."

As for the spoken words, the lack of contractions in the characters' dialogue was pulled straight from Damon Runyon's original short stories. Most people do not talk in a such a formal way when conversing with their peers—
but it was a unique way to present the characters as thinking they were more educated than they actually were.

And so here it is, the film that took home two Golden Globes, including Best Picture - Musical or Comedy, and was nominated for four Academy Awards: starring Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Jean Simmons, Vivian Blaine, and with a supporting cast of Stubby Kaye and Sheldon Leonard, here is Joseph Mankiewicz's 1955 hit musical comedy, GUYS AND DOLLS.