A Film Canon

Guys And Dolls builds on the anti-noir aesthetic of Gene Kelly's musicals, neutralising a series of motifs (gambling, organised crime, misogyny, social decay) that, a decade before, would have been noir staples and, two decades before, would have been gangster staples. To this end, Mankiewicz tacitly reduces organised morality to a straw man, in the guise of a Salvation Army outfit conducted like any other business, and headed by Sergeant Sarah Brown (Jean Simmons), whose sense of vocation is little more than a defence against her own proclivity to sin. The dubiousness of this establishment is further enhanced by its emasculating vision of an army of women and old men - a shrewd retention of noir's underlying fears - albeit never shorn of its familial warmth, as if Christianity had been entirely reduced to the institutions of marriage and parenthood. Hence the striking conclusion, in which a sermon ("Follow the fold, and stray no more") segues into a double wedding that takes place on the street, and encompasses all the characters and cast; a marriage of the disparate parts of an increasingly disorienting urban landscape. From this perspective, the contained staginess of Howard Bristol's exquisite set design is itself a defence mechanism, partaking of the heightened, deliberately regressive theatricality of the 1950s musical, but also justified by the self-consciously theatrical streetscape that it evokes: "Only on Times Square does the dawn get turned on by an electrician." In keeping with this turn away from realism, the 1930s and 1940s taste for song fragments is replaced by full-blown musical numbers (including such standards as "Sit Down, You're Rocking The Boat" and "Luck Be A Lady"), while the actor-singer is fragmented into the rapport between an actor (Marlon Brando) and a singer (Frank Sinatra), whose  clumsiness is embodied by their contrived, uncontracted, 'ethnic' register.