Oklahoma! (1955) -- Underwhelming Except for the Songs

 

The best shot in the entire movie was the very opening. It was all downhill from there.

Believe it or not, in all my explorations of classic cinema, I had never seen Oklahoma!. But yesterday I had been thinking about the subject of my last post Shane (1952), and on whim I checked out the TCM schedule for the day and saw that Oklahoma was about to start on the TCM West feed. Thinking I had no excuse not to spend the next two hours filling in this gap in my knowledge of the Hollywood canon, I opened up my iPad and fumbled with my TCM app until the movie came up right as it was starting.

It opens with a wide vista of the plains and the opening theme song. Ah, this is what I need right now! I was expecting the grandeur of a classic M-G-M musical, one that is also a western. Everyone loves this movie, right?

But I was wrong out of the gate. To my astonishment, this is not M-G-M. It was made by RKO as an adaptation of the Broadway stage show, and it shows. The cinematography of the plains is nice (and very un-M-G-M, which had perfected soundstage murals for exteriors), but the movie clearly lacked something that can only be called spectacle. As such I had to temper my expectations downward so as to avoid disappointment. 

Of course the Rogers and Hammerstein score is top-notch. The songs are among the most recognizable singable in Hollywood history. But they existed prior to the movie as part of the Broadway show. The fact that the show is a good choice for high schools does not mean the motion picture will be of superior caliber.

Is there anything wrong with Oklahoma! per se? I suppose not. It's that I wanted it to be much more. I was expecting it to be the M-G-M movie that came out the previous year, also about pioneer settlers (of the other O-territory), and which was largely forgotten for decades, only to be resurrected as a bona fide classic largely through the singlehanded efforts of former TCM host, the late Robert Osbourne. To wit, I was expecting it to be Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

It's simply unfair to compare Oklahoma! to that last mentioned movie, which has some of the most elaborate and spectacular "barn dance" numbers even set to celluloid, all of them choreographed by the peerless Michael Kidd under the supervision of Stanley Donen. RKO's Oklahoma! equivalent "barn dance" number, The Farmer and the Cowman, offers nothing beyond the catchy singable tune. The choreography is utterly underwhelming and feels almost amateurish by comparison to Kidd's masterpiece. It feels like RKO's pale imitation of the M-G-M masterpiece from the year before.

To me, RKO felt out of its depth in this genre. M-G-M had been a factory for musicals for over a decade (at least since 1944). Seven Brides was the masterpiece swan song of that old M-G-M craftsmanship as the genre was fading from history. True the songs of the latter are not quite as recognizable as the Rogers and Hammerstein ones from Oklahoma!. Yet as for me, when I am walking a footpath on a sunny day, I am far more likely to break into Bless Your Beautiful Hide than I am to start singing Curly's famous aria Oh What a Beautiful Morning!, as grand as it is. But maybe that's just because my natural register matches Howard Keel's baritone much more than Gordon McCrae's tenor.

The story of Oklahoma! is much simpler as well, and not completely in the good way. Jud (Rod Steiger) feels too cardboard as villain. I wound up feeling sorry for him. The story's climax (with Jud's revenge deadly attack coming after the wedding of Curly and Laurie) was just plain awkward and destroyed the emotional flow of the plot for me. It might work on stage but it should have been reworked for the movie (despite the inevitable hew and cry from the Broadway purists).

Meanwhile Seven Brides tells a complex story with a dire struggle but without a villain. Everyone's point of view is understandable. The closest one gets to a villain is the hero, whose pride and stupidity set in motion the (temporary) misery of the other characters. He must grow beyond his previous beliefs in order to win his wife's affections.

And don't get me started on Eddie Albert's performance in Oklahoma! as Ali the peddler. He alone as roguish as any of the characters in Seven Brides.  Are we supposed to think he is not really a Persian but a Irishman masquerading as a Persian? It would go to his character in the movie, so I guess it makes sense. Like I said, it's a much simpler story.

Finally, although Shirley Jones was delightful in her breakout role (fifteen years before she'd be in The Partridge Family) I simply didn't mind Laurie's "dream sequence" under the influence of the smelling salts. The fact that RKO saw fit to use different actors for both Curly and Laurie in that is understandable, given the intricacies of the dancing requirements in that scene, The on screen "hand off" to the substitute Curly and Laurie is one of the bizarre and confusing things I've ever seen on screen. No doubt there is a story behind this but sheesh, M-G-M would have never thought to do that.  M-G-M's system was famous for "teaching anyone how to dance." They would have gotten actors who could sing and dance for that part. RKO couldn't do that and it weakened the film tremendous. How much better it would have been to see the real Shirley Jones being held aloft in her beauty.

Part of me feels like a real party pooper was saying I was underwhelmed by Oklahoma! Surely I can't be the only one with this opinion? 

I realize that for "modern audiences", Oklahoma! is probably far more palatable than Seven Brides. For the former, all you would need is a proper "land acknowledgement" at the start of the movie, whereas the latter is, well, sheesh, extremely problematic. I myself love it, and would defend it's humor and irony (not to mention the heteronormative gender roles), but that's me. Oklahoma! is heteronormative as heck to be sure, in the 1950s way, but at least the "hyper-toxic masculine" is defeated at the end in favor of only the normal toxic traditional patriarchy. Blood sacrifice is obtained against the toxicity, whereas in Seven Brides, (trigger warning!) the Patriarchy triumphs big time, and as a result, everyone in the whole story lives happily ever after under the oppressive yoke of frontier-society gender roles. 

If you want to know deep insights about the psychology men and women offered through art and narrative, guess which one I'd recommend? Answer: the one with Julie Newmar in it.

Reeeeeee!!!!! Can no one can take a fucking joke anymore?

Shane (1952) -- My Mother's Favorite Movie

If there was a movie I could identify as the favorite film of my late mother, it would probably be Shane which was made in 1952. It starred Alan Ladd in his most famous role, a  gunfighter trying to escape his path, but who is forced by circumstance into his old life, in order to defend the innocent. 

As I trype this I am watching this on Turner Classic Movies. It was famously shot in glorious Technicolor in the open country around the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. It is probably the most famous depiction of this range in film.

The story has a Zen-like simiplicty to it, slow moving like the open frontier itself, but then bursting into a fury in episodes, including the famous climax pitting good versus evil. 

Against it all is the famous supporting performance by 10-year old Brandon de Wilde as Joey, who idolizes the stranger who rides into the family ranch one day and changes their lives.

For my mother was a lifelong feminist, before it particularly popular. It is easy to see in retrospect that so much of this was driven by her frustration is finding the strong masculinity of her own father, a World War II veteran. She spoke of the character Ladd made famous on screen with almost romantic dreaminess, in the same tones as the little boy in the movie, repeating key lines, including the famous parting words at the end. As such the character Shane is somewhat embedded in me as the ideal of the masculine--stoic, reticent, strong and protective. This is probably true for many boys raised in the post-war years. I may have been one of the last ones to experience Shane in that way. It might be fair to say that the character Shane is embedded into the psyche of the men of the Baby Boomer generation in a way that was impossible to live up to.

As for myself, I noticed that the movie is a good example of my theory of the "Magic Cow of Happiness".  Thas my pet idea that the depiction of cattle in a Hollywood movie mirrors the theme and emotion of the story at large. The very first use of cattle we see at the ranch is as Shane arrives. We see a cow with calf beside it. The calf is the little boy Joey.

The movie came out at what might be called the peak of American Post-war culture. It is about as "straight" of a western as one will find, perhaps the archetypal 1950s western reflecting the ideas of American culture at the time. At the time my mother was probably the same age as the little boy in the movie.

One element of the movie that stands out prominently as making it a "classic western" is that the action takes place "100 miles from the nearest U.S. marshal." It is about Americans attempting to create civilization in the absence of governmental authority. This is the unique feature of American westerns, and reflects the unique self-organization of us as the American people. Classically it is the essence of American liberty, the bedrock of our idea of ourselves as a free people. By the 1950s we had developed the structure of government but still felt ourselves in contact with the old model in living memory.  Arguably this has retreated in our culture, as had the classic ideals of masculine protectiveness. Men today yearn to fill that role but often feel frustrated in that. We believe ourselves less and less to be a self-organizing people with each passing day.  

Now I'm going to watch the rest of the film. It's been a long time.