For the Love of Sky Masterson
By: Maggie Blaha
I watched a fair amount of movies with my dad when I was a kid, and if I had to name his favorite I’d say it’s the 1955 Joseph L. Mankiewicz film Guys and Dolls. The MGM spectacle was adapted from the Frank Loesser musical that debuted on Broadway five years before, which also happens to be my dad’s favorite play.
Guys and Dolls is a quintessential technicolor movie musical, meant to be a vehicle for some of the biggest stars at the box office. Marlon Brando had just won his first Academy Award for Best Actor in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront when Sam Goldwyn, the prominent movie producer and executive of several Hollywood studios, decided to cast him as the romantic lead Sky Masterson. But Brando couldn’t sing. He himself told a reporter in a 1955 interview that his voice was akin to a dying yak. Even so, casting him would ensure the picture made money.
My dad’s face lights up whenever Guys and Dolls is showing on Turner Classic Movies. I haven’t watched it with him since I was little, but I assume he still taps his foot to the beat of the music and accompanies each number with a styling on par with Brando’s (or a dying yak). If you haven’t seen the movie or the original Broadway musical, it’s basically a wholesome, lighthearted story about gangsters and petty criminals in late-1940s New York City. All the gangsters are portrayed as lovable, goofy middle-aged men. They have names like “Nicely-Nicely Johnson” and “Rusty Charlie.” But Sky Masterson was the smooth operator, the high-stakes gambler who presumably my dad imagines himself to be whenever he watches the movie, because there’s always one character who we identify with or wish we could identify with.
In reality, my dad can more easily relate to Nathan Detroit, the comedic counterpart of Sky Masterson played by Frank Sinatra. Sinatra wanted to be Sky, too, when he realized the character had more substance than Nathan. In many of his films, Sinatra didn’t get to play the romantic lead. He was a skinny guy from Hoboken, New Jersey, who didn’t exactly look the part. My dad’s a skinny guy from Newark, New Jersey, who also could never play the part of Sky Masterson, however much he might want to.
The fact that Sinatra was cast as Nathan instead of Sky was a pain point on the set of Guys and Dolls, as the tension between Brando and Sinatra caused members of the cast and crew to take sides. I get why Sinatra would be jealous: Brando couldn’t even sing and was cast as Sky, while Sinatra was world famous for winning hearts with a song. He also resented Brando’s acting style and the diversion from Hollywood glamour it represented. Knowing how much Sinatra hated his “Method Acting” (the art of doing multiple takes of a scene to discover something new about a character in each one), Brando would sometimes do a scene with Sinatra perfectly but blow the last line so that they’d be forced to do a retake.
Sinatra rebelled against the comedic New Yorker persona playing Nathan Detroit required as much as he could. Instead of singing his numbers in character, Old Blue Eyes crooned them as himself. It’s sort of his way of reminding us that “Hey, I am a romantic lead and nothing like this doof Nathan Detroit, motherfuckers!”
Nathan’s a well-meaning gangster who’s caught in the crossfire of domestic bliss and the freedom of being a bachelor gambler. He’s had an understanding with Adelaide (played by Vivian Blaine who originated the role on Broadway) for 14 years but has found one reason after another not to commit to her. We can assume he loves Adelaide, otherwise why wouldn’t he have left her a long time ago, but running illegal crap games is in his blood and he’s reluctant and unwilling to give it up. The whole plot of the film centers around the fact that Nathan needs to organize a crap game, but because the cops are cracking down on illegal gambling, none of the usual venues will host it. He eventually finds a garage owner to host it, but only if Nathan can produce $1,000 in advance.
To get this money, Nathan decides to bet Sky that he can’t get Sergeant Sarah Brown (Jean Simmons) of the Save a Soul Mission to go to Havana with him for a night. Because Sarah Brown needs sinners to keep her branch of the mission open and Sky knows plenty of sinners, he convinces her to come to Havana with him, where after a night of drinking and dancing they fall in love. So Sky’s the gambler who would never fall in love with any woman, Sarah’s the strait-laced missionary who never gave love a thought, and the odds were against them falling in love. But they did, and it’s romantic. Nathan’s relationship with Adelaide is, well, less than romantic.
We’re meant to laugh at Nathan and Adelaide’s dysfunctional, drawn out relationship, knowing that we can all kind of relate. But Sky and Sarah are the characters we want to be.
Why do we respond to fictional characters in this way? Why do we make them into real people, and is this necessary for enjoying a film? After doing some Googling and reading some disreputable sources, the main theory I found is that we become attached to characters we enjoy spending time with. This means that we don’t necessarily have to identify with them; we can just admire them and want them to be our friends.
The gangsters in Guys and Dolls are depicted as friendly, as guys who can be your buddies, which is what Damon Runyon (the writer of the short stories the play is based on) knew them as. But I get the sense that the way my dad feels about Sky Masterson is the way he and most men feel about James Bond: he just wants to be him or know what it’s like to be him. This is something we’ll be discussing quite a bit on the podcast and in future newsletters, because we suspect it’s a huge part of how dads process and experience films. Even if it’s subconsciously, my dad probably wonders what it’s like to be Sky Masterson: handsome, charismatic, self-assured.
Characters like Sky Masterson represent a kind of manliness that some men aspire to. From observing my dad, I think he’s felt emasculated most of his life. Not that he should be ascribing to false, socially-constructed models of masculinity, but there aren’t and weren’t many alternatives, especially when my dad was growing up.
When he was seven, my dad contracted encephalitis from the measles. He was in a coma for a few months, had to learn to walk and talk again, and after all he suffered was left with the mockingly strange handicap of having his left hand permanently curled into a fist. I say “mockingly” because it’s always seemed like a cruel and funny thing for a serious illness to leave in its wake. It’s not hard to explain to people, but I used to think it was. But I can’t imagine how hard it was for my dad.
Kids are cruel, so he’d get made fun of for his hand, for the way his voice sounded after he started talking again. My dad never thought he’d get married until he met my mom. She sometimes has to cut his meat for him if he forgets his special knife when we go out to eat. And because my dad can’t play sports, he finds every other possible way to get involved with them. He’s independent, by pretty much all accounts normal, and yet I sometimes sense that he doesn’t really feel like a man.
So when my dad watches Guys and Dolls, maybe he’s escaping into Runyon’s 1940s New York overrun with lovable gangsters and thinking about how great it must be to be as suave and as cool as Sky Masterson. And it doesn’t depress him that he’s not, but he can’t help but admire how manly Sky is.
On second thought, it’s more likely that I’m just imposing all this on my dad. It doesn’t seem like he even thinks when he watches movies — they’re just a kind of white noise. But this would also explain why Guys and Dolls is his favorite movie. There isn’t anything to think about. There’s no real depth to the plot or characters, but I think that’s all my dad looks for in a film. He’s surprised by cliches, he wants to laugh, he wants to be entertained. On that score, Guys and Dolls delivers.
