How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Directed by David Swift, this musical adapts Frank Loesser's Broadway show, which ran 1,417 performances and won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, one of only ten musicals ever to do so and the fourth at the time. A young, ambitious window washer rises from the mailroom to chairman of the board by following the advice of a self help book of the same name, manipulating colleagues and working office politics with precision. Robert Morse, Rudy Vallee and several others reprised their Broadway roles, Morse having won the 1962 Tony for the part. The signature moment of the stage version had Finch singing "I Believe In You" to himself in a mirror, while in the film Rosemary sings it to him, inverting the number's irony. All of Rosemary's own songs were cut. Made for three and a half million dollars, it returned only two point nine million in rentals and counted as a commercial disappointment. The more interesting part of the story is what came later for Robert Morse: forty years on he played Bertram Cooper, the eccentric founder of an advertising agency, in Mad Men, set on the same 1960s Madison Avenue, turning the young hero of an office satire into the old man running the place. Who it's for: Fans of classic Broadway musicals and 1960s corporate satire. Who it's not for: Those seeking the stage version's bite should know the lead character was deliberately softened for the screen.