Main Cast: Ethel Merman, Donald O'Connor, Marilyn Monroe, Dan Dailey, Johnnie Ray
Release Year: 1954
Country: US
Run Time: 117 minutes
Plot
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" format. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
Big, colorful, and splashy, There's No Business Like Show Business might have been a classic movie musical if anyone had bothered to create a script for it. Oh, there's technically a script, but it clearly was just cobbled together from hither and yon -- and mostly yon -- so that the camera would have something to focus on between musical numbers. As a result, Business meanders around quite a bit, dropping in on one thread of a story just long enough for the audience to hear a few lines of clichéd dialogue before the orchestra starts vamping the intro to the next song. Fortunately, the songs are by the inimitable Irving Berlin, and they're handled by a cast that ranges from the technically qualified to the magical. The former includes a very wooden Johnnie Ray and a perky but dispensable Mitzi Gaynor, but the latter includes a clarion-voiced Ethel Merman, an impishly appealing Donald O'Connor, and the incredibly seductive Marilyn Monroe. (Dan Dailey falls in the middle, a good song-and-dance man and decent actor who nevertheless doesn't quite catch fire in this film.) Merman sounds terrific, sailing through "Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee" and "A Sailor's Not a Sailor" with glee, and O'Connor makes "A Man Chases a Girl" into something pretty special. But it's Monroe that provides the single most memorable number, a "Heat Wave" that sizzles, pops, burns and scorches like few other filmed songs. Add in some yummy costumes and nifty Leon Shamroy camerawork, and there's more than enough here to make up for the flimsy story. ~ Craig Butler, All Movie Guide
The film depicts the traveling, singing and dancing Donahue Family, with Merman and Dailey as the parents, and O'Connor, Ray, and Gaynor as their adult children. It proved to be a disappointment both commercially and critically[citation needed], but it remains the only film in which Merman sings that song (although she did reprise it in the 1967 television version of Annie Get Your Gun) Show Business was an extremely expensive movie. It did not make back its cost[citation needed], but it did attract a considerable audience.
Monroe did not want to make this film but agreed after Fox promised her the lead in Billy Wilder's screen version of the Broadway hit, The Seven Year Itch.
The film's storyboard is neither a "true comedy" nor a "true melodrama". The fictitious family-the five Donahues- is depicted in both good time and bad times, a bittersweet mode of musical instead of an old-fashioned one. Marilyn Monroe's fictitious character, as the sixth "name principal" having a long role in the film, is given a variety of interactions with the fictitious Donahues. She originally attempts to compete with the Donahues as her character climbs the vaudeville ladder on which they have already perched at the top rung, but later makes a very sincere effort to become part of their close-knit, supportive family traditions. The musical seems ahead of its time (in the heyday of MGM musicals) in the sense of a contrasting very forward-looking story format with its old-fashioned musical numbers representing a pastiche of well-known Irving Berlin songs from different eras.
