How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967) is a musical made at the end of the Golden Years of musicals. As such, we never bothered to watch it until now. Worth the wait.
It stars Robert Morse, a kind of funny looking guy. sort of reminded me of Dudley Moore, or Michael J. Pollard, or maybe Keith Moon. He's a window washer on a Manhattan skyscraper, but one day he buys a book, "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying". So one day, he steps in through a window, and strips off his jumpsuit to reveal a business suit. He immediately bumps into the president of the company, Rudy Vallee, who angrily tells him to go to Personnel if he wants a job.
He does, but when he gets there, he meets a secretary, played by Michelle Lee. She is smitten with him, while he is standoffish, and her secretary friends are not impressed. Anyway, Morse goes on the sweet talk the Personnel exec into giving him a job in the mailroom.
And so his rise begins. By a combination of sucking up to the boss, pretending to work all night, and blackmail, he rises through the ranks. He gets Vallee's girlfriend Hedy LaRue (Maureen Arthur) as secretary, and has her deliver his memos for maximum affect. And of course, he finally allows himself to be won over by Lee.
This is all very amusing, in a slightly dated way. But it's also a musical, based on a Broadway show. The music is by Frank Loesser, with Nelson Riddle doing the incidental music. The choreography is based on Bob Fosse. So we get some angular walking, synchronized secretarial pooling, and so on.
It's a lot of fun. The songs aren't too memorable (to me) except for "I Believe in You", which Lee sings to Morse, then Morse sings to himself. The setting is very Mad Men by way of Mad magazine. I enjoyed seeing this look at corporate culture in a world teetering on the brink of the counterculture revolution.
So how about Bye Bye Birdie? Haven't seen that one either.
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