Guys and Dolls is a classic Hollywood fusion of stage and screen

The relationship between Broadway musicals and their Hollywood incarnations has often been out of step, no matter how well executed the choreography. Such is the case with Guys and Dolls (1955), the super-lavish, super-stellar version of a legendary Tony-award-winning show that boasted a spectacular 1,200-performance run earlier in the decade.

The source material is by Damon Runyon, once renowned for his fanciful take on a New York underworld populated with rowdies whose rough exteriors conceal hearts of gold. The stories tread a fine line between charming and sappy, and achieving the former demands a cartoony surrealism easier attained in theatre.

Multiple-Oscar-winning director-writer Joseph L. Mankiewicz begins his only musical in a daring manner by having the first five minutes consist entirely of dance on a stylised Manhattan set. This leads to a spirited rendition by original Broadway cast members of the Fugue for Tinhorns number. The first line of dialogue is not delivered until nearly eight minutes have passed, and another four elapse before the appearance of a bona fide star.

After making this unconventional start, Mankiewicz only fitfully displays such boldness in the rest. But when he does, Guys and Dolls soars. The guys and dolls at centre stage are at their most endearing when broadly painted, and none are more so than the brassiest broad of the bunch, Miss Adelaide (Vivian Blaine, who originated the part on Broadway).

A nightclub entertainer impatient to marry her fiancée of 14 years, gambler Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra), she radiates a larger-than-life quality that enlivens the proceedings. Her musical numbers, whether accompanied by the club's Hot Box Girls ( Take Back Your Mink and Pet Me Poppa) or alone in front of her medicine cabinet to commiserate about spinsterhood-instigated psychosomatic conditions ( Adelaide's Lament), are standouts.

If the production's other three stars pale in comparison it's because their performances, while stylised, aren't stylised enough. As ultra-cool gambler Sky Masterson, Marlon Brando reveals an acceptable singing voice in the movie's best-known tune, Luck Be a Lady. But the subplot about his seduction of the repressed missionary Sarah Brown (Jean Simmons) doesn't go anywhere convincingly, even when the couple have a tryst in Havana.

While Sinatra is certainly at home portraying a man whose claim to fame is, to quote the title of yet another of composer Frank Loesser's inventive lyrics, "The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York", Adelaide is so endearing that it's hard to find humour in the way his character treats her.

From today's perspective, the missionary's half-baked morality and the two heroes' chauvinism would have benefited from a more over-the-top approach. But when Michael Kidd's brilliant choreography kicks in, and the director wisely refrains from flashy editing to allow the audience to enjoy it unfold in glorious Eastmancolor and Cinemascope, Guys and Dolls merits its place among the classic Broadway-Hollywood fusions.

Guys and Dolls, February 14, 5pm, HK Arts Centre, Wan Chai. Part of the HKIFF Cine Fan programme