THE PLEASURE OF HIS COMPANY

Take an all-star cast (including Fred Astaire, Debbie Reynolds, Lili Palmer, Tab Hunter, Gary Merrill and Charlie Ruggles), a hit Broadway show (The Pleasure of His Companyby Samuel Taylor and Cornelia Otis Skinner), a world-class director (George Seaton), and what could possibly go wrong? The answer is, in a word – nothing. The plot is a bubbly confection about a ne’er-do-well rich man named “Pogo” Poole (Astaire), who returns from his many travels to attend the wedding of his daughter Jessica (Reynolds), a debutante who hasn’t seen her father since he and her mother (Palmer) divorced. As in all bubbly confections, there are complications, misunderstandings, charm, laughs and the eventual happy ending. The Pleasure of His Company has all these in spades with an emphasis on the “pleasure.” Hired to compose the score was the great Alfred Newman, who’d recently ended his long tenure at Twentieth Century-Fox.

Newman had scored several of director George Seaton’s early films, including Chicken Every Sunday, The Big Lift, For Heaven’s Sake and Anything Can Happen, and just as Seaton had migrated from Fox to Paramount, so, too, did Newman. There he scored both The Pleasure of His Company and Seaton’s next Paramount film, The Counterfeit Traitor.

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