Skip to footer

The 25 best movie musicals of all time

The American Film Institute picks the best song-and-dance stories ever put on film.

3. 'Guys and Dolls'

  • By Molly Driscoll Staff Writer

The 1955 film, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, centers on two gamblers, Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra) and Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando). Nathan bets his friend Sky that Sky can't win over the local prim missionary and take her on a date to Cuba. Sky wins the bet when he and Sarah Brown (Jean Simmons) set off for a romantic island dinner, but he finds himself in over his head when he falls in love with her. Meanwhile, Nathan tries to stay on the good side of his longtime fiancée, Adelaide (Vivian Blaine).

Modern viewers may be startled by the fact that Nathan, Sky, and their other gambler friends very rarely speak with contractions ("I have been" and "you will admit" rather than "I've" and "you'll"). The style came from the writing of author Damon Runyan, whose stories "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown" and "Blood Pressure" were the basis for the musical.

3 of 25
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.