There's No Business Like Show Business

In this archetypal Fox musical, such details as plot, cast, and character development are swept aside by the mindless but fairly irresistible anthem to razzmatazz embodied in its title. For the record (and with a dozen Irving Berlin standards enshrined in decors of surpassing garishness, one might be better off buying it), the plot involves two generations of a vaudevillian family; the cast includes Merman at her loudest, Dailey at his crassest, and Monroe, thank heaven, at her 20th Century Foxiest; while character development is mostly confined to crooner Johnnie Ray's anguished decision to enter the priesthood (in scenes that are not merely mawkish but downright mawk).