Nothing has been
done, Crowther assures us, to alter the Broadway staging of this great musical,
and this is somehow important, let us say because we get to see the imaginative
surface only supplemented by sound stage and park, and because there is nothing
up the sleeve in Hollywood, no further considerations. That is important,
finally, because this particular work of genius is totally intricate and you
don’t want anything to louse up the works.
Supervisor (John
Raitt) and Grievance Committee (Doris Day) are in love, boss (Ralph Dunn)
won’t give raise amounting to seven-and-a-half cents. Supervisor gets
secretary (Carol Haney) drunk at Hernando’s Hideaway, obtains the key to
the ledger, finds the boss is charging for the raise but not paying out, since
six months ago. Compromise, no retroactive pay.
Employees at
Sleeptite plan whole lives upon that raise, “Steam Heat” is what
you don’t get without stoking the furnace. A once-in-a-lifetime pact is
formed at the company picnic, “my once-a-year-day.”
The time-study man (Eddie Foy, Jr.) is a knife-thrower jealously in love
with the secretary, a slowdown and the rendezvous
(“I know a place”) drive him to distraction.
The Grievance
Committee’s father is a railroad man and stamp collector, they live by
the tracks. What makes the whole thing go and how to sleep tight are the great
themes of this all-around musical, which must be added to the audiovisual
curriculum of business schools right alongside Wise’s Executive Suite.
Jean-Luc Godard (Cahiers du Cinéma),
“Stanley Donen is surely the master (major or minor) of the musical? The Pajama Game
exists to prove it.”
Damn Yankees
Three years it
played on the New York stage, and still Bosley Crowther of the local paper
failed to grasp the Devil’s plot, which is to allow the Washington
Senators a long-hitter to win the pennant but dash their hopes before it
happens.
Señorita Lolita
Hernando, 172 years old, “the ugliest girl in Providence, Rhode
Island,” is the instrument of the hitter’s destruction, failing
that there is his identification with Shifty McCoy who took a dive in the
Mexican Leagues, and finally there is an “impulse” that turns him
back into a middle-aged fan at the crux, nothing works.
Crowther did
notice the careful presentation of the show on film, with ballpark
interpolations.