The Best Things in Life Are Free is a 1956 American musical film directed by Michael Curtiz. The film stars Gordon MacRae, Dan Dailey, and Ernest Borgnine as the real-life songwriting team of Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and Sheree North as Kitty Kane, a singer (possibly based on Helen Kane). In 1957, the year after the film was released, it received an Oscar nomination for Lionel Newman in the category of Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture.

Plot

Cast

Reception

Critical response

Premiering in September 1956, The Best Things in Life Are Free was met with mixed reviews. Some reviews called it "the biggest new musical this year" and others "a musical-comedy that could've been produced on a higher budget with bigger and better production numbers".

Box-office performance

Being a musical, though a modestly produced one, the movie was fairly expensive to produce. The film ended with a budget of $2.86 million and made just over $4 million at the box office, earning $2,250,000 in North American rentals in 1956.

Songs