The Girl Rush

This long-out-of-circulation musical is finally viewable, via Amazon Prime, and it has a warmed-over feel. Rosalind Russell, fresh from her Broadway triumph in "Wonderful Town," plays an Eastern busybody who inherits a run-down Las Vegas casino and mistakenly thinks she has a piece of the Flamingo, owned here by a rather unhappy-looking Fernando Lamas. Paramount seems determined to prove that Roz is a MUSICAL star, and she does sound better than she did in "Wonderful Town" (or the "Gypsy" film, for that matter), and executes Robert Alton's unchallenging choreography neatly enough. But of all the women Fernando Lamas might be attracted to, she seems like she'd be the last. The love story has no conviction, and Robert Pirosh's screenplay keeps falling back on tired gags, like a befuddled Marion Lorne dithering about, or James Gleason, always welcome, as an inveterate gambler. The Martin-Blane score is quite nice, the mid-'50s Vegas location photography sumptuous, and the costumes amusingly over the top. Gloria De Haven's lovely and gets one of the best songs, "An Occasional Man," but it's discouraging to see her playing such a dummy, and Eddie Albert seems too old to play such a papa's boy. In short, there are plenty of incidental pleasures, but the darn thing doesn't add up.