Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

Micransix Crappy film

Majorthebys Charming and brutal

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Dunham16 The play is about workers in an Iowa pajama factory whose owner wishes to refuse them a raise and to this end hires a new site manager told to keep it from happening until the new guy falls for one of the three elected representatives of the staff. Broadway performers cast in the film include four of the leads - John Raitt, Eddie Foy, Jr., Carol Haney and Reta Shaw. Doris Day in the film takes the part played on Broadway by Janis Page as one of the three union leaders. A fine memory of life in these times for those who lived through them but so dated today it may not please every movie buff. Its two production numbers, Once A Year Day and Seven And A Half cents are well done on screen.

preppy-3 Employees at the Sleeptite Pajama Factory are ready to go on strike if they don't get a raise of (get this) 7 1/2 cents an hour! A new manager (played by John Raitt--Bonnie's dad) is hired to cool things down and falls in love with one of the employees (Doris Day). But will the salary dispute tear them apart?The plot is OK and some of the dated aspects are amusing--the 7 1/2 cent raise and a company picnic that offers free beer! The songs are great (I love "Hernando's Hideaway" and "Hey There"), Raitt and Day can sing beautifully and the production numbers are full of energy and color. The only negatives here are that Raitt and Day have zero sexual chemistry together and Raitt isn't the best actor...but when he sings all is forgiven. For some reason this is pretty unknown but it's a very good 50s musical.

bkoganbing I remember seeing The Pajama Game when it first came out back in 1957 at the old Nostrand theater in Brooklyn. It played on a double bill with The Joker Is Wild. It was the first Doris Day film I ever saw and it became and remains my favorite. By the way that was some double bill because The Joker Is Wild became my first and favorite Frank Sinatra film.The Pajama Game was the successful product of a lot of creative talent, starting with director/writer George Abbott and also including composers Richard Adler and Jerry Ross. All the principal parts of the show that ran from 1954 to 1956 for 1063 performances on Broadway made it to the screen with the exception of Janis Paige who was Babe Williams.In fact Jack Warner in keeping with his policy of making sure at least one movie name for box office was included, something we all commented about when he brought My Fair Lady to the screen seven years later with Audrey Hepburn instead of Julie Andrews, was going to do the film with either Janis Paige or John Raitt from the Broadway cast. How the decision was made who knows it could have been a coin flip. But what happened was that Doris Day got her best musical film role in my humble opinion. It's so incredibly right for her.Now if it had gone the other way, rumor has it that Dean Martin would have co-starred with Janis Paige. Dino would have been great as Sid Sarokin, but at least we got an opportunity to see John Raitt do at least one of his Broadway roles for the screen.Raitt had the big hit out of The Pajama Game, Hey There. The Pajama Game Broadway Original Cast and Film record both sold well with Hey There being featured. However Rosemary Clooney and Sammy Davis, Jr. had the big hit records on the charts for this song. In Sam's case it was the first big recording hit of his career. As for Rosemary's version, it's done the way John Raitt does it on screen, into a Dictaphone with him commenting on the playback.George Abbott and Stanley Donen co-directed The Pajama Game and their collaborative effort did a wonderful job in translating the musical from stage to screen. The Pajama Game has as much dancing as singing in it and I find it hard to believe the entire thing was done on the Warner Brothers sound-stage, looking at that Once A Year Day number that Bob Fosse choreographed. I refuse to believe that wasn't done outdoors. In fact The Pajama Game showed influences of the film version of Picnic released the year before in that particular number.Doris Day's big number is I'm Not At All In Love which is perfectly suited to her sunny optimistic style of singing. Done with a touch of irony because union organizer Doris is definitely falling for plant superintendent Raitt.We can also thank the Deity that Carol Haney got to repeat her part as kookie Gladys the secretary and get to Hernando's Hideaway. Would you believe that Shirley MacLaine was understudy to Haney on Broadway? It's a fact and again she would have made a great Gladys. But I'm happy Haney got to do her part. She was also a great choreographer in her own right and you can bet she had her input with Bob Fosse in doing her numbers.It's sad, but The Pajama Game is quite dated now. The labor situation in Eisenhower America is a whole lot different than in Bush II America. The whole plot of The Pajama Game revolves around a small town in middle America where the main employer is the SleepTite Pajama company and a labor dispute involving a 7 1/2 cent per hour raise for the workers. More than likely today, SleepTite Pajamas are being made by some third world workers for subsistence wages and there's another depressed former company town in America.Dated though it is, this is one great musical, one of the best ever done on Broadway and transferred for posterity to the cinema.

MARIO GAUCI I'm not a big fan of vintage Hollywood musicals any more and can only return, even if with trepidation, to just a handful of classic titles. For that reason, I haven't watched one in ages…but this film had always been a highly-touted example of the genre – being also more adult than usual, with a social theme involving an impending factory strike – so, I decided to give it a go. That said, my adjustment to the schmaltzy style which so characterizes musicals of this era wasn't immediate...However, there's no denying that the songs by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross are splendid – even if I preferred the more intimate numbers; likewise, Bob Fosse's choreography felt impersonal for the most part (though I was, admittedly, conditioned by the fact that I'd seen the musicals he later directed – which exhibited a definite, and unique, stylization to the dance steps – prior to this one!). Anyway, the best musical sequences are: Doris Day's "I'm Not At All In Love", John Raitt's melancholy "Hey There" (later reprised by Day), "Steam Heat" (a recognizably Fosse number highlighting Carol Haney) and the stylish "Hernando's Hideaway" (though, in retrospect, it seemed silly to me that the latter is ostensibly a "secluded place" and yet all the factory-workers seem to hang out there!).The cast, of course, is headed by Day (ideally cast here as the head of the factory's "Grievance Committee", with the film itself generally considered as her best); many of her fellow performers had originated their characters during the show's Broadway run – including leading man John Raitt (rather stolid in his only major film role), Eddie Foy Jr. (as the burly manager at the factory whose fits of jealousy and penchant for throwing knives could turn dangerous when he's had one drink too many!) and Carol Haney (as the latter's fiancé and the factory-boss' secretary in what proved to be her last film, as she died quite young).Ultimately, the film isn't up to Donen's best (and better-known) musicals – such as ON THE TOWN (1949), SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952) and SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS (1954) – nor do I see myself watching it as frequently as his two delightful imitation-Hitchcock comedy-thrillers, namely CHARADE (1963) and ARABAESQUE (1966). Still, even if I wasn't quite as enthused with the film as I'd hoped, I'd still like to catch the same team's follow-up musical – DAMN YANKEES (1958), if anything for its Faustian overtones.