Three for the Show

Betty grable was 39 when she made Three For The Show, She looked fabulous, sung wonderful songs and outdanced the reigning blonde Marilyn Monroe who Grable handed the Fox Blonde crown to in 1953, this movie made in 1955 shows what a glamorous movie queen Grable could have continued to be. this movie was made at Columbia and Grable should have put down roots there, she was offered Pal Joey but turned it down, silly Grable . anyway as movie historys most successful moneymaker Grable reigns supreme. she outperformed Marge Champion and her then husband Gower, who 10 years later ignored Grable when she headlined in Broadways Hello Dolly his show, he sent his assistant to oversee Grables rendition of Dolly Levi. shame Gower! Grable the No.1 Star! No Columbia did not cheaply hire Grable, they paid her $200,000 for this movie, marilyn was still getting her $125,000 per film at fox.Other comments about being old and fat are vicious, Betty was stunning in this movie check youtube and see the clips from "Three for the Show".

If you have managed to somehow miss this musical, watching it 60+ years after it was released is a revelation. Betty Grable's appeal makes sense to me at last, in this her last major film at the age of 39. The plot in a nutshell: A successful performer has been widowed by World War II. She marries her late husband's songwriting partner, played by Gower Champion, but the new marriage becomes a racy ménage a trois when her first husband, played by Jack Lemmon, shows up alive and eager to claim his conjugal rights. Grable plays her cards right, through a series of dreamy song and dance sequences with music by George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Hoagy Carmichael. The extraordinary dance team of Marge and Gower Champion has never looked better, nor have "Someone to Watch Over Me," "Just One of Those Things," and "I've Got a Crush on You" ever sounded better. Some critics say Grable imitated Marilyn Monroe; I prefer to think that her performance was a gesture of handing over the "Hollywood's hottest blonde" crown to Monroe and quitting while she was ahead, which she definitely was in this film. Favorite line from Grable: I've got what most women want-a lover and a husband and they're both legal!"

What an interesting pedigree Three For The Show had, dating all the way back to 1920 when W. Somerset Maugham's play Too Many Husbands debuted on Broadway with a long forgotten cast. It had a military background instead of a show business one, though the military does figure prominently in the plot.

Collaborators Jack Lemmon and Gower Champion have a hit show on Broadway for producer Myron McCormick that stars Betty Grable. Lemmon goes into the Air Force during the Korean War and goes MIA. He's reported killed and Grable who was married to Lemmon, now marries Champion. Then of course Lemmon returns and they've a situation the reverse of My Favorite Wife.

In the meantime poor Marge Champion is champing at the bit because she's got a thing for Gower. I think you can figure out where this one is going.

The numbers come from a variety of sources, some original, some Broadway, some classical. Betty Grable in what proved to be her next to last film did more serious type dancing here than in any other. But next to the Champions, she really did not look that good. It was unfair to cast her with them.

Grable also did not like working for Harry Cohn, she was used to another imperious studio mogul over at 20th Century Fox who had kind of eased her out of her number one spot for the fast rising Marilyn Monroe. But she thought he was a pussycat next to Cohn. Two For The Show was Betty's first outside film after 14 year at Fox.

Jack Lemmon proved to have a couple of good singing notes as he does accompany the rest on a number or two. He liked working with Grable because he felt she was unpretentious with a good sense of humor as apparently a lot of her colleagues did.

As a film though, Three For The Show will never rank first rate in the work of either Lemmon or Grable.

Musicals are dying, you're Harry Cohn, you have all those expensive sound stages and wide-screen cameras lying around... what do you do? He remade one of Columbia's not-first-rate-to-begin-with screwball comedies, "Too Many Husbands," outfitted as a very splashy and very insubstantial musical with an oddball cast. Good it's certainly not, but for students of the evolution of the '50s musical, it's interesting. Betty Grable, legs as spectacular as ever, has married Gower Champion when first husband Jack Lemmon, thought dead in the war, returns. It's a standard plot, silly and overstaged, with Lemmon and Gower throwing a lot of fake punches at each other. But the filmmakers do try to retrofit it in musical ways. The score, mostly Gershwin standards, isn't well sung, and Grable and Lemmon are a terrible match -- she just seems too much woman for him, and she was nearly a decade his senior. But he does warble passably and even dances and tickles the ivories a little. Most striking are a couple of extended, wordless sequences, not exactly dancing and not exactly not, but choreographed, to classical chestnuts: They show the makers' desperation at trying to do something, anything, new, to keep musicals alive. Marge Champion, not a singer, surprisingly has to sing a lot. She and Gower have the best sequence, a falling-in-love pas de deux filmed practically in one take, like the good old Fred and Ginger duets. But the movie feels underpopulated -- these four and Myron McCormick, as an unappealingly avaricious agent, are practically the whole cast -- and Gower, though lean and graceful, looks impatient to jump out of the Cinemascope frame and go direct.

Musical version of 1940's "Too Many Husbands", via W. Somerset Maugham's play "Home and Beauty" (which the author said he wrote as a lark), has widowed--and remarried--Broadway star in a marital quandary: her first husband's death overseas was misreported by the US Air Force (he was actually marooned on an island), and now she has two husbands...and both marriages legal! Betty Grable toys with the possibilities--she even fantasizes a musical number with dozens of suitors housed in cages, climaxing with she and her two husbands under the sheets smoking a hookah! But, this being 1955, we instead have Betty ordering both her husbands out of her boudoir come bedtime. The plot predicament, not surprisingly, doesn't come to much, but in the interim we have some bright moments, not the least of which is Grable's Marilyn Monroe-like delivery in the final number, "How Come You Do Me Like You Do" (which sounds a lot like MM's "Lazy" with a design resembling her "Heat Wave"). Director H. C. Potter opens the picture with a berserk pantomime number danced to "Someone To Watch Over Me" (in harlequin costumes!), but he gets good performances from both Grable and Jack Lemmon (who also sings a little and dances a bit). As the second couple, Marge and Gower Champion dance nicely together but don't have much pizzazz, much like the rest of "Three For the Show". A pleasant marquee-filler but hardly a headliner. **1/2 from ****