There’s No Business Like Show Business

To say that there’s minimal plotting involved in There’s No Business Like Show Business is an understatement. The plot, brief and confounding as it is, exists mostly to string about a series of Irving Berlin songs. The performers are all able and, mostly, entertaining and do a decent enough job, but it’s a hollow copy-and-paste job of the MGM musical machinery.

Business involves the Donahues, a family that got its start in vaudeville and continues to perform. There’s mom and pop, played by Ethel Merman and Dan Dailey, their two sons, Donald O’Connor and Johnnie Ray, and their daughter, Mitzi Gaynor. Ma and pa used to perform and take the kids along with them, eventually they settled down long enough to send their kids to school. Once the kids are all grown-up they join their parents in performing. With mom being mostly a songstress, dad being an all-around entertainer, the kids picked up an impressive array of skills. O’Connor is an all-around entertainer like his dad, Ray is a singer, Gaynor is a hoofer with passable vocal skills. Ethel Merman is an odd screen presence, and her full-throated vocals are more loud and obnoxious than anything else. She’s either too stiff in front of the camera or chews the scenery like crazy. Dailey is passable but never really ignites. O’Connor looks too old to be their son and seems at odds with his overly dramatic storyline. He creates magic whenever he’s allowed to goof around and sing and dance. Gaynor barely makes any kind of impression since she’s given so little to do. And Ray, a phenomenal talent, is a charismatic black hole in this. When he says he wants to leave the family business to become a priest, you’d be excused for thinking he was going to come out of the closet.

Marilyn Monroe, barely in the film, is a deliciously vampy and sexual hat-check girl who dreams of becoming a huge performer. That she does this is no surprise, why she’s introduced at all since she’s so quickly written off and thrown to the side is. Monoroe is criminally underused, but when she is on screen she’s a kind of combustible sex goddess – threatening to blow apart the scenery with her giggle and jiggle. Monroe even sells the “Heat Wave” number in which she is given an outfit that doesn’t look entirely flattering on her body type. But when she performs a seductive number while lying back on a couch – wowza!

In Chicago a character says that if you give them “the old razzle dazzle” that you’ll leave them begging for more. Sometimes that is the case, but you’ve got to actually give us a script, character development, heart and brains. Business is mostly just hollow eye candy, but there’s something watchable and entertaining about it. Especially whenever Monroe is on screen, but then again Monroe could make anything entertaining and give it a sexual charge.