The Pajama Game

The Pajama Game is a 1957 American musical comedy set in a pajama factory in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Babe Williams, a worker there, is chosen to present her colleagues' case for a pay increase, while the plant's new superintendent, Sid Sorokin, has been brought in by management to resist that demand. The two fall for each other, and their romance unfolds against a labor dispute that pushes the workforce toward a strike and puts the couple on opposite sides of the argument.

George Abbott and Stanley Donen directed the film, the sixth in the directing career listed here, following Funny Face and preceding Indiscreet. Abbott wrote the screenplay with Richard Bissell, working from the Broadway show; Bissell's novel 7½ Cents was its source. Doris Day and John Raitt lead the cast as Babe and Sid, with Carol Haney, Eddie Foy Jr., Reta Shaw and Barbara Nichols among the forty credited performers. Bob Fosse choreographed the Broadway production, and his style carries into the numbers staged here, including the well-known "Steam Heat."

The film runs 103 minutes and was released by Warner Bros. Pictures in late August 1957. Its critical and audience scores sit close together: a critics' rating of 7 out of 10 from sixteen reviews, alongside 6.6 on IMDb from roughly 4,500 votes and 6.3 on TMDB from a much smaller sample of seventy. The wide gap in vote counts reflects a familiar pattern for musicals of this era, which hold up better with critics and dedicated viewers than with casual audiences.