6/10
Betty Grable working for Columbia in her last year of making movies: results tolerable if lacking in zest...
4 April 2024
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! 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 Lemmon (who also sings a little and dances a bit). As a 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 ****
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