Tout le plaisir est pour moi

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.

..and with Marge and Gower Champion and Jack Lemmon...it is lots of fun. Fun is what Betty Grable was about...and this film is at its best during those sequences aimed at amusing. ...These days people do not understand Betty Grable very well. In her day she was everyman's and every womans ideal. Indeed no woman has broken Betty's box office record (eleven years in the top ten). And, in the forties and early fifties, women still dominated the box office to an amazing degree--Mom chose the films the family was going out to see. Though it was a bit early to be obvious, Betty in many ways represented a manifestation of what we would now call a liberated woman. She was nearly always working (in revealing clothing!), and she was self supporting. In real life she was a very successful working mother--and particularly during WWII she was an inspiration to women manning the homefront as much as an inspiration to the armed forces fighting overseas. She was pretty, talented, popular, and the highest salaried woman in the United States. Now she is remembered primarily as a 'pin up'--which she also was, but the title tends to diminish the many other factors that created her popularity. One thing is certain, in "Three for the Show" or any other of her starring films--she will entertain you royally within the limitations of the material she was given.

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!"

Much has been said to deride this film, it's stars, it's musical format and general premise but I enjoy it from start to finish. Another musical (from Britain) also released in the mid-fifties ; "Let's Be Happy" was equally dismissed by critics and public and both films are remembered by devotees only. It's a pity that both of these musicals brought to a cruel halt the film careers of Betty Grable and Vera-Ellen respectively ; two of filmdom's brightest and loveliest ladies still in their prime.

The above mentioned musicals are two of my favourites and how overjoyed I am that they have both been preserved on DVD in wide-screen and glorious colour. I'm one very satisfied customer.

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.