Oklahoma! (1955)

Wonderful Movie

Very Cool!!!

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Blistering performances.

Oklahoma is an enduring musical, but with such a simple story it is also overlong, has two dimensional characters and despite some classic songs it also has its share of forgettable ones and there are lots of them.The story is just about two romances in the rural farmland. Curly (Gordon McCrae) a cowboy who guides cattle and Jud (Rod Steiger) a hired farm hand both pursue the lovely Laurey (Shirley Jones.) It is a losing battle for the poor and brooding Jud and the rejection is driving him insane.The other story is more comic, Ado Annie (Gloria Grahame ) also being pursued by two suitors. The exotic slippery tongued peddler Hakim from Persia (Eddie Albert) and Will Parker (Gene Nelson) a cowboy who arrives to town to marry Ado Annie with the fifty dollars he promised her father he would have. The film was made in 1955, Hakim does not have a chance to marry a white woman! Then again Hakim just wants girls who want to have fun.The film is colourful but hokum. There are some nice sequences such as a dream sequence featuring Steiger. However Steiger who would go on to become an Oscar winning actor is woefully misused in this film. Just cast as a blatant villain when his character should had been more shaded and Steiger would had delivered a much better performance in spades.The ending is rather poorly staged with the haystack fire and the fight between Jud and Curly. The courtroom scene is also rather laughable.

I came across this movie recommendation as I was looking for works by the duo, Rodgers & Hammerstein after seeing their greatest work 'the sound of music' so many times.True to my expectations, the music throughout this musical drama was fantastic. On first listen itself most of the songs registered in my mind.Though I guess no movie or work of theirs can ever make a impact like 'The Sound of Music' did, still it is worth spending couple of hours watching this musical.Not much to say about the plot that's there... not very strong, none of the characters really registered in my mind from start to end, but having said that, it never really bothered me that the plot or characterizations were too simple or too scope-less, because the frequently occurring songs just compensated for the same.I highly recommend this musical to all those who enjoy the works of Rodgers & Hammerstein.My rating is just for the music only.March 1st: UPDATE -Just revisited this movie for just listening to the songs again & boy, did I enjoy!! It was just mind blowing......... amazing music & lyrics. Great performance by the lead actors to act & sing along. Now along with 'Sound of Music' I have one more musical which I revisit whenever I want to listen to some wonderful music.

Remember, the stage version opened on Broadway in '43, in the midst of WWII, when the war was beginning to turn in the favor of the allies. There were quite a few musicals during that period that incorporated 'love America' themes or songs. Also, when this film version was released, the US was feeling on top of the world, now that the Korean War was also a memory. Thus, a musical that espoused an overall very optimistic feeling about the future was appropriate for both time periods. The US was then functioning as the breadbasket of the world, with ever increasing yields of various crops, due to a combination of breeding, more fertilizer, pesticide and irrigation use and more mechanization. The Midwest was no longer in the throws of the '30s dustbowl. So, why not make a joyful musical about Midwestern ranchers and farmers. The perennial theme of young love would be fused with the theme of a new state (Oklahoma) being born(in 1907).The one fly in the ointment of all this euphoria appears in the form of the sexually-frustrated hired hand Jud(Rod Steiger), who lacks the looks, personality and status to make a hit with the local young ladies, thus imagines making it with French hussies, such as those pictured on the wall of his smokehouse abode. He also dreams of making it with the prim beautiful niece(Shirley Jones as Laurey) of his employer((Aunt Eller). He gets his chance when coy Laurey and her boyfriend Curley(Gordon MacRae) have a spat. But, later, we find out just how much fear and hatred Laurie feels toward Jud as a potential romantic partner, both in her long dream ballet sequence, and during their actual ride in a buckboard to the box social. In the latter, their fighting causes the buckboard horse to run wild, and she takes over the reigns and leaves Jud in the 'dust'. Later, while the others are celebrating the marriage of Curley and Laurie , Jud is planning to spoil their happy nuptial night. when as part of the nocturnal festivities, the two climb on top of a high haystack. Jud sets the stack on fire. As he pulls out a knife, Curley jumps on top of him, and he falls on his knife from the impact...Steiger would play a very similar character just the next year in the non-musical western "Jubal", where his death is not shown, but suggested at the end...The scene where Curley goes to chat with Jed in this stronghold of the smokehouse is very strange, to say the least. In the first portion, Curley makes a hanging rope and speculates what might happen at his funeral, should Jud decide to hang himself, painting a relatively favorable impression of Jud. He sings "Poor Jud is Dead", and Jud even chimes in toward the end. This is an example of how the songs were well integrated into the screenplay. Jud recounts how someone(him?) set the house of his former employer on fire, killing all. Eventually, Curley turns antagonistic, and Jud ends the scene by firing a shot into the ceiling, as a proxy for Curley....Was Jud inherently a crude menacing man or was he just reacting to his treatment by others as an apparent born loser? The two tend to reinforce each other. He comes across as having been a bully as a boy.This was Shirley Jones's first film, she being part of the Rogers and Hammerstein play crew. She plays the prim, hard -to-get beauty, contrasting with Gloria Grahame's shy, but fun -loving 'easy' girl character: Ado Annie, as well as with the aggressively flirtatious Gertie. Both get to sing several memorable songs: "I Can't Say No" being Gloria's signature sing.. Gloria was a very strange choice for a film where she sings a solo. She was tone deaf! Thus, her singing had to be pieced together note by note! The well-known Betty Hutton was actually the first choice for her role, but turned it down. No matter, Gloria worked out just fine.Gene Nelson, who plays Ado Annie's chief boyfriend, had been included in a number of musicals, often teamed with MacRae, who was the main singer, while Nelson was the main dancer. However, Nelson could also sing tolerably, as shown in this film. He also gets to dance a bit in the early part. However, he doesn't get to be the lead dancer in the dream ballet sequence. Rather, James Mitchell takes Curley's place in this sequence, while Bambi Linn takes Laurie's place. This is similar to the replacement of most of the original personalities by facsimiles, in Gene Kelley's dream ballet, in "On the Town". I remember Mitchell as Cid Charisse's stone-faced dance partner in their cameo dance in "Deep in My Heart". Here, he also mainly functions to support Bambi's movements. The bizarre dream ballet is more interesting than that in "On the Town", incorporating most of the songs up to that point, and soon turning nightmarish, dominated by Jud and his imagined French dancer floozies, with Jud killing Curley to claim Laurie...Unfortunately, "Oklahoma" is the only significant film record of the talented choreographer Agnes de Mille: niece of director Cecil.Charlotte Greenwood , as the matriarchal Aunt Eller; Laurie's guardian, is another example of the perfect casting. At age 65, she had been in theater most of her adult life, as a vaudevillian talent. She helps maintain a degree of sanity among the romancing younger generation, while getting to sing a bit, although not getting to exhibit her trademark sideways high kick, seen in some of the Fox musicals of the early '40s. MacRae and Shirley would soon be reteamed in the generally darker-themed R&H "Carousel", with fewer memorable songs, but several of these perhaps even more memorable than those in this film.

Superior filming of great R&H musical with Shirley Jones and Gordon MacRae ideally cast in the leads. They share a great chemistry but even better their voices blend beautifully together on the top notch score. Gloria Grahame was considered miscast at the time as Ado Annie due to her supremacy as a film noir fixture but she is charmingly coquettish and addle-pated. However she was apparently a terror to work with on the picture engendering the animosity of cast and crew and damaging her reputation and career which never fully recovered. Eddie Albert and Charlotte Greenwood provide nice bits of humor as Ali Hakim and Aunt Eller with Rod Steiger is a terrifically dark and menacing Jud Fry. Highly stylized this has gorgeous production and costume design all filmed in widescreen Todd-AO and Technicolor, a fantastic entertainment of the type that Hollywood has forgotten how to make.