Cracking the Morse Code

How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying is almost note for note a reincarnation of the 1961 Broadway hit. Therein lies its troubles as well as its triumphs.

On stage, Succeed succeeded by being as broad as it was wide. A pastel-colored animated cartoon of contemporary big business, it musically chronicled the rise of a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed rodent, J. Pierpont Finch (Robert Morse), who won the rat race by running just fast enough to keep up with his boss (Rudy Vallee).

On film, Succeed often fails by seeming to run in place. Director David Swift has staged far too many of the numbers simply as people singing songs, with the camera standing by as an admiring observer. There is nowhere near enough sight humor to justify the billing "visual gags by [Cartoonist] Virgil Partch."

Vallee's brilliant bumbling, on the other hand, is even better on the wide screen, as when he Freudian slips, "I like the way you thinch, Fink" and intones the college musical lampoon, Grand Old Ivy. For the first time, Hollywood seems to have cracked the Morse code: after appearing in a succession of turkeys--most recently Oh Dad, Poor Dad (TIME, March 3)--Bobby is finally allowed to steal a picture the way he stole the show. He burbles with the irresistible energy of a degenerate Peter Pan as he chants to a mirror, I Believe in You.

To redeem itself further, the movie implements Frank Loesser's score with inventive arrangements by Nelson Riddle, and augments the chorus with a bevy of twittering birds who assure the executives that A Secretary Is Not a Toy. Equally good is the staff of ulcerated businessmen who inch their way along the top of the company as they pinch their way around the bottoms of their secretaries. Comically caught in the act, unfaithfully married and unhappily harried, they are reminders that How to Succeed was good show business because the structure of its satire rested, however slightly, upon a grain of truth.

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