There's No Business Like Show Business

Like Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938), 20th Century-Fox's There's No Business Like Show Business is a "catalogue" film, its thinnish plot held together by an itinerary of Irving Berlin tunes. The story chronicles some twenty years in the lives of a showbiz family, headed by Dan Dailey and Ethel ...more

Big, colorful, and splashy, There's No Business Like Show Business might have been a classic movie musical if anyone had bothered to create a script for it. Oh, there's technically a script, but it clearly was just cobbled together from hither and yon -- and mostly yon -- so that the camera would have something to focus on between musical numbers. As a result, Business meanders around quite a bit, dropping in on one thread of a story just long enough for the audience to hear a few lines of ...more