Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

This week's movie is Samuel Goldwyn's 1955 production of America's own musical, "Guys and Dolls."

Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed and wrote the screenplay, an adaptation of the 1950 Broadway musicals book by Joe Swerling and Abe Burrows.

Based, in turn, on short stories by Damon Runyon.

Frank Lesser provided the music and lyrics for both versions, eliminating some songs from the Broadway production, and adding several new ones for the movie.

"Guys and Dolls" stars Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, Frank Sinatra, and Vivian Blaine, with Stubby Kaye, Johnny Silver, B.S.

Pulley, Sheldon Leonard, and Regis Toomey.

The movie opens in the hustle and bustle of Times Square in New York City where tourists, hustlers, gamblers, prostitutes, and police pursue their daily round of activities.

Three small time gamblers, Nicely Nicely Johnson, Benny South Street, and Rusty Charlie argue over their picks for the races.

Nearby, the band from the Save A Soul Mission plays, led by young and pretty Sergeant Sarah Brown.

Nicely Nicely and Benny worked for gambler, Nathan Detroit, who was desperately searching for a place to stage his illegal floating crap game.

Lieutenant Brannigan of the NYPD has been cracking down on illegal activity, and no one is willing to oblige Nathan except Joey Biltmore of the Biltmore Garage, who demands a thousand dollars up front for the use of the property.

But Nathan doesn't have a grand to spare.

Adding to his problems is the growing impatience of showgirl, Miss Adelaide, his fiance of 14 years, who wants him to go straight so they can finally get married.

Nathan spots an old acquaintance, Sky Masterson, a prosperous gambler, notorious for his willingness to bet on anything.

Nathan makes a thousand dollar bet with Sky that he cannot persuade a woman of Nathan's choosing to have dinner with him in a Havana.

A bet Sky readily accepts.

Nathan chooses the prim Sergeant Sarah Brown of the Save A Soul Mission, who condemns not only alcohol, but the sin of gambling as well.

"Guys and Dolls" is based on short stories by journalist and writer Damon Runyon, whose fiction celebrated the Broadway low life of New York that arose during the 1920s and thirties.

The guys in his stories were gamblers, gangsters, and con artists, while the dolls were showgirls, shop girls, and prostitutes who were their malls, mistresses, and steady companions.

Runyon's writing inspired two different adjectives.

Runyon-esque refers to the sort of characters, situations and dialogues depicted in his stories.

Runyon-ese, on the other hand, describes the particular vernacular his characters speak.

A combination of formal speech and street slang rendered almost exclusively in the present tense with a notable lack of contraction.

For example, this exchange.

"I just acquired 5,000 fish."

"5,000?

If it can be told, where did you take on this fine bundle of lettuce?"

"I have nothing to hide.

I collected the reward on my father."

Appropriately enough, Alfred Damon Runyon was born in Manhattan on October 4th, 1880, but perhaps less appropriately, he was born in Manhattan, Kansas, into a family that included many newspaper men.

When he was seven, his family moved to Pueblo, Colorado where he began newspaper work after leaving school when he was nine.

As a teenager, Runyon joined the Army and fought in the Spanish American War in 1898.

Then returned to Pueblo in journalism, specializing in sports report.

In 1910, he moved to New York, where he covered the New York Giants and wrote a baseball column for the Hearse chain of newspaper.

His stories of the characters and oddballs of the sporting world created a new style of sports journalism and led to his writing a series of short stories full of fictional versions of the same sort of eccentric and unusual characters that populated his news story.

Runyon ultimately published 13 books of short stories and three books of poetry, as well as a play, and a biography of World War I Flying Ace, Eddie Rickenbacker.

His stories were adapted into 12 motion pictures, many of them later remade, some more than once, and both a radio and a television anthology series.

Oh, and one Broadway musical that was later made into a motion picture.

The Broadway musical "Guys and Dolls" opened November 24th, 1950, starring Robert Alda as Sky Masterson, Sam Levene as Nathan Detroit, Isabel Bigley as Sarah Brown, and Vivian Blaine as Miss Adelaide with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, a book by Jo Swerling, and radio comedy writer, Abe Burrows, and under the direction of George S. Kaufman.

The show ran for 1,200 performances and won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

Although Robert Alda had many motion picture as well as stage credits, producer Samuel Goldwyn wanted a major star to play Sky Masterson, so he cast Marlon Brando, who was by far the biggest star in Hollywood at the time, although not because of his ability to sing and dance.

Brando worked hard to improve his musical abilities, working with voice coaches and the film's choreographer, Michael Kidd, but still felt his voice sounded like, "The mating call of a yak," as he put it.

Ultimately, his songs were spliced together from many different sound recordings as he sang his songs over and over.

Goldwyn is happy enough with the result, that Brando and costar Jean Simmons both are heard singing in their own untrained voices in the film, at a time when substituting the voices of professional singers for those of actors was commonplace.

Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz wanted Sam Levene, who had originated the role of Nathan Detroit on stage, to recreate the role for the movie.

Levene appeared in 50 motion pictures beginning in 1936, including as Police Lieutenant Abrams in two of "The Thin Man" films.

Abe Burrows had in fact, written the part of Nathan Detroit specifically for Levene.

Loesser gave Detroit only one song, "Sue Me", because Levene couldn't sing.

But Goldwyn chose Frank Sinatra over Levene to play Nathan Detroit, saying, "You can't have a Jew playing a Jew.

It wouldn't work on screen."

Mankiewicz was disgusted.

He said, "If there could be one person in the world more miscast as Nathan Detroit than Frank Sinatra, that would be Laurence Olivier, and I am one of his greatest fans."

The role had been written for Sam Levene, who was divine in it.

Goldwyn also had Frank Loesser write a new song, "Adelaide", for Sinatra to sing, but Sinatra refused to do it in character, instead using his signature crooning style.

Between that and Sinatra's lackluster performance of "Sue Me", Loesser refused to watch the film, and in fact, never did.

Sinatra had his own gripes during filming.

He had wanted to play the lead role of Sky Masterson and resented the fact that Brando, who couldn't sing or dance, was cast instead.

Sinatra disdained what he called "This method crap," and resented Brando's practice of asking for take after take on a given scene to help him refine his character's reactions and emotions.

Sinatra hated rehearsing and felt that each retake sapped the scene's spontaneity.

He reportedly told Joe Mankiewicz, "When Mumbles is through rehearsing, I'll come out."

Regis Toomey, who played Sarah Brown's Uncle Arvide Abernathy, later said, "Sinatra was snotty and very difficult, as he really didn't want to do the role.

Joe Mankiewicz had an awfully hard time on that picture."

Sam Goldwyn wanted "Guys and Dolls" to take advantage of the widescreen Cinemascope process, but for Mankiewicz, this presented another set of problems.

"When you've got to fill the Cinemascope screen, everything spreads out," he said later.

"On that screen, you had twice as many gangsters, twice as many twirls, and twice as many intricacies."

One of the key decisions in the making of "Guys and Dolls" was to set it in a sort of timeless fantasy, Runyonesque Manhattan.

Although there are some brief references to television and other cultural touchstones of the mid '50s, the costumes of the gamblers and gangsters are flashy technicolor versions of fashions of the '30s and '40s.

The film was shot entirely on a soundstage recreation of New York streets and buildings and sewers with ads for fictional products flashing in neon in a clearly ersatz Times Square.

The energetic choreography by Michael Kidd and the colorful Oscar-nominated costumes by Irene Sharaff also contributed to the movie living up to the stage show's subtitle, "A Musical Fable of Broadway".

"Guys and Dolls" was, for the most part, favorably received by both critics and audiences.

It premiered on November 3rd, 1955 and was still a top box office attraction well past Christmas, ultimately making over $9 million worldwide on a budget of about 5 million.

Even Big Jule from Chicago would not sneer at a return on a wager like that.

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.