Forgotten Musical: 'Give a Girl a Break'

Marge Champion, Helen Wood and
Debbie Reynolds in Give a Girl a Break (1953).
Under another name, Wood would star in porn films in the 1970s.

Hollywood produced dozens of movie musicals from the late 1940s into the mid-1950s. Many such as Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon, Easter Parade, Summer Stock, A Star Is Born, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, are regarded as classics by fans and scholars today. Yet there are many minor cinema tuners worthy of savoring. Give a Girl a Break (1953) is one of these. Largely forgotten, it's difficult to find. I had to pay $10 to order it in digital form on Amazon video. I watched it during the Christmas-Hanukkah-New Year's break. It's now obscure, but it has a simple charm and features a fascinating cast. I have a vague memory of watching it at my aunt's house in Philadelphia on the late Sunday afternoon TV movie when I was a kid.

Marge and Gower Champion

I was always curious about the film since it was one of the few to star Marge and Gower Champion, a husband and wife dance team who were supposed to be the next Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Champion went on the direct and choreograph many of the greatest musicals in Broadway history including Bye Bye Birdie, Hello, Dolly!, and I Do! I Do! He divorced his wife and capped his career with the stage version of 42nd Street. Producer David Merrick famously announced that Champion had died earlier that day at the curtain call on opening night, insuring headlines coast to coast and cash at the box office. The Champions headlined one other film--Everything I Have Is Yours (which I also remember watching on the local Philadelphia Sunday afternoon movie). They shared the spotlight with Red Skelton, Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson in Lovely to Look At and they took featured roles in Show Boat (probably their best known film), Three for the Show and Jupiter's Darling. Except for Show Boat, these films are even harder to find than Give a Girl a Break.

Gower Champion was incredibly handsome. Slim, athletic and masculine, he could have been the next Gene Kelly. In Jupiter's Darling, he plays a slave bought by Marge's character and he is incredibly alluring in a toga. But he and his wife lacked that certain spark that makes a movie star. Eleanor Powell suffered the same fate. She was probably the best dancer ever filmed, but when paired with Fred Astaire in Broadway Melody of 1940, their tap number to Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine" was sensational, but she has no sex appeal. Ginger Rogers was not as spectacular a dancer, but she and Astaire clicked.

Another distinction of Break's casting is Bob Fosse who plays a gofer to Champion's stage director. Like Champion, Fosse became a fabled director-choreographer (Damn Yankees, Pajama Game, Sweet Charity, Chicago) after his onscreen career stalled. Fosse also staged his own numbers in Break, though Champion and director Stanley Donen received choreographic screen credits. The film came out just after Donen had directed Debbie Reynolds, who also starred in Break, in the smash Singin' in the Rain. Sidenote: I met Donen at the New York Drama Critics Circle Awards a few years ago. He was with his partner comedy legend Elaine May. I actually told her how much I loved her comedy routines with Mike Nichols and would do imitations of them at cast parties when I was doing community theater. She said, "Do one now." I complied with a few moments of the Telephone routine ("Hello, operator, can you get me the number of Mr. George Kaplan?" "Is that K as in Knife"?) I should have done the Mother-Son bit ("Hello, Arthur, this is your mother, do you remember me?") But I digress. Back to Give a Girl a Break. BTW, the screenplay is Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett who later won the Pulitzer Prize for The Diary of Anne Frank.

Debbie Reynolds and Bob Fosse in the big balloon number
from Give a Girl a Break

Here's the plot: The star of a big Broadway show has walked out in a temperamental huff. After an open call, the director-choreographer Ted Sturgis (Gower Champion), composer Leo Belney (Kurt Kaszner) and gofer and general assistant Bob Dowdy (Bob Fosse) each have their own choice to take over, mostly for romantic reasons. Ted prefers his ex-partner Madeline Corlane (Marge), who quit the stage and is now apparently the kept woman of some rich guy with the hoity-toidy name of Anson Pritchard (William Ching). Evidently Anson is paying for Madeline's penthouse apartment, complete with a rooftop garden big enough for she and Ted to dance a jazzy duet. Leo wants Joanna Moss (Helen Wood), a ballet/modern dancer married to poor music professor Burton Bradshaw (Richard Anderson). Leo isn't aware Joanna is married. (Kaszner and Anderson later achieved some fame on lousy TV shows--Kaszner on the short-lived Land of the Giants and Anderson as the boss of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman. More about Helen Wood who I had never heard of, later.) Bob is interested in Susy Doolittle (Reynolds), a green kid from the Midwest, living with her mother (Lurene Tuttle) in a walk-up apartment. Mom has apparently left Susy's dad back in Kansas or wherever to chaperone Susy as the girl pursues a show-biz career. "I gave up an eight-room house with your father for this," she cries at one point. The Hacketts leave out the details of the Doolittles' arrangements as well as those of Anson and Madeline.

Despite the shortcomings of the storyline, there are several nifty songs and dance routines. The songs were by Burton Lane and Ira Gershwin. Gershwin's participation surprised me since none of the numbers turn up in retrospectives of his storied career. Most of his work after the death of his brother and partner George is not anthologized. I do recall Carol Burnett doing one of her mini-musical tributes to Ira's lyrics which included such post-George masterpieces as Lady in the Dark and A Star Is Born (I could do a whole other posting on the numbers cut from that movie and maybe I will.) Gershwin's lyrics are intricate and clever, particularly during the cute Reynolds-Fosse love duet "Our United State" where their love is compared to the government. Reynolds and Fosse also have an elaborate number shot backwards with balloons unpopping and confetti falling all over the place. Reynolds later joins Champion in a "Show-Biz" extravaganza with a conveyor belt delivering clowns, acrobats, and men in horse costumes to "Applause, Applause" nearly 20 years before the musical of the same name opened on Broadway.

The strangest revelation of all connected with this film was Helen Wood. I'd never heard of her before. An online search showed she had danced on Broadway in Seventeen and Pal Joey, winning a Theater World Award. She went to Hollywood and got a movie contract, landing the role in Give a Girl a Break. The film flopped and her screen career fizzled. After dancing in Las Vegas and with the Rockettes, she found herself too old to win chorus girl roles. As a single mother, she needed to earn a living and replied to a casting call for an adult film. Her training as a dancer allowed her to continue as a nude sex performer into her middle age. Taking the name Dolly Sharp, she appeared in several X-rated features including the classic Deep Throat. I wonder if she ever came home from a hard day of having sex to see herself on the Late, Late Show dancing with Debbie Reynolds and Marge and Gower Champion. According to the website Rialto Report, she left the porn biz when Deep Throat became a mainstream sensation and she could not pursue legit jobs like teaching dance because of her X-rated fame. She kept a low profile working as a waitress in little towns across the country. She passed away in 1998 at age 63.

Give a Girl a Break was an intersection of so many fascinating lives and careers. It's light and fluffy but a wonderful curio of a bygone age of movie musicals. It makes me want to find more forgotten musicals.