Oklahoma!

After seeing OKLAHOMA! on the screen in Todd-AO for the first time 44 years ago, it immediately became my all-time favorite film. Today, it still holds that lofty ranking.

The beautiful Rodgers & Hammerstein score includes some of the greatest music ever written. The two collaborated on nine broadway musicals, many of which were adapted to the screen, notably CAROUSEL, SOUTH PACIFIC, THE KING AND I, and THE SOUND OF MUSIC, but OKLAHOMA! tops them all.

Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones are perfectly cast as the young couple experiencing the magic of first love, and their singing of some of the show's classic tunes, such as "Surry With the Fringe On Top" and "People Will Say We're In Love" is a pleasure to listen to.

Miss Jones, making her screen debut as Laurie Williams, instantly establishes her image of the "girl next door"--did I grow up in the wrong neighborhood? She is captivatingly charming as she tries to make Curly (MacRae) jealous by accepting a date to the box social with her Aunt Eller's hired farmhand, Jud Fry, played menacingly by Rod Steiger.

It is the supporting cast of characters that really bring this musical to life--particularly Aunt Eller, played by Charlotte Greenwood. Doesn't everyone have an Aunt Eller in their life? Then there's Ado Annie Carnes (Gloria Grahame) and her longsuffering boyfriend Will Parker (Gene Nelson), who lights up the screen with a great dance number. Throw in a travelling salesman, Ali Hakim (Eddie Albert); Gertie Cummings (Barbara Lawrence), who tries to steal Curly away from Laurie; and Mr. Carnes (James Whitmore), who insists on a shotgun wedding for his daughter, Ado Annie, rather than see her marry Will; and you have some unforgettable characters indeed.

The film's one dissenting note was the class distinction warfare between the handsome, clean-cut Curly, who everyone knows "Laurie has her cap set fer" and the rough and dirty, working-class Jud. Jud meets his untimely end, but, after all, he is the villain.

Not to fear, it's a happy ending for all. Curly gets Laurie, Will gets Ado Annie, and Ali Hakim gets....Gertie? When Ado Annie and Gertie get into a jealous fight which Will attempts to break up, explaining "I'm trying to keep Ado Annie from killing your wife", Ali Hakim responds, "Why don't you mind your own business?" In the end, the farmer and the cowman do learn to get along and become friends, the new schoolhouse gets built, and the Oklahoma territory is about to become a state.

OKLAHOMA! won two Oscars, for Best Sound Recording and Best Scoring of a Musical Picture. How could they go wrong with great orchestral direction by Robert Russell Bennett and the musical score by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II? The American theatre will never see their equal again.

I've seen this musical on stage, acted in it in college and have also seen the Hugh Jackman version.

This is the gold standard. MacRae's near operatic baritone nails the opening 'Oh What a Beautiful Mornin' and the closing 'Oklahoma!'. He's perfect for the part of Curly.

Has there ever been a more beautiful, corn-fed, farm girl Laurie than Shirley Jones? Terrfic soprano too.

Gene Nelson's 'Kansas City' was a stimulating piece of choreography, dancing and singing.

Rod Steiger as Jud did well to elicit sympathy despite the elimination of his song 'Lonely Room'. Jud's a fatal attraction killer; he hints to Curly that he torched an entire family to death because the farmer's daughter rejected him. He was creepy & frightening. I'm not surprised he had no friends; he made no attempt to be friendly. His dark and brooding presence seems to have wandered in from a Tennessee Williams play. A good thing too; without Jud, 'Oklahoma!' is so light and frothy it threatens to float off into sunny western sky.

That said, I thought the dream ballet struck the wrong note. The ballet made it seem as if Laurie was fascinated by the forbidden dark side represented by Jud vs the sunny optimism of Curly. The dream ballet Jud was always surrounded by dancing girls, making him charismatically evil, not at all like the warped loner who lived in the smokehouse. In her waking moments, Laurie found Jud repellent. She only agreed to go the social with Jud because Curly was so smug. Perhaps Jud should have been played by Robert Mitchum.

This was one of the few musicals where all the actors were permitted to sing in their own voices. The genius who directed 'South Pacific' and 'Camelot' would probably have cast Tab Hunter as 'Curley' and Terry Moore as 'Laurie'.

The music was just wonderful; there's enough melody here to make several musicals of the caliber of 'Cats' or 'Rent'. Notice how danceable it is. 'Beautiful Mornin' and 'Out of My Dreams' are waltzes.

I just acquired the set of Rogers and Hammerstein's musicals on DVD, and am enjoying them immensely; the picture clarity and sound are outstanding and the music and story good to boot!! I believe this was Shirley Jones' debut in a movie, and she portrays Laurie to a tee, and has ample support from all of the other actors, with fine comedy support from Gloria Grahame and Charlotte Greenwood; have enjoyed Ms Greenwood in earlier films she did at Fox, and am wondering if she played Aunt Eller on Broadway.... The ballet sequence is exquisitely handled by Agnes DeMille, and the dancing in all scenes superb; if there was any complaint it would only be that the scenes with Jud seem a little prolonged and drawn out, but overall, an excellent film...

The stage-to-screen musical became an institution during the 1950s, one that would reach its peak in the mid-1960s and then quickly decline. Within the industry, I wonder if a certain prestige attached itself to established directors who could create good musicals, because many a veteran director tried his hand at it. Between 1955 and 1970, directors like Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Robert Wise, George Cukor and Carol Reed, none of them known as musical directors, would make some of the best-known and best-loved screen musicals of all time. Fred Zinneman tossed his hat into the ring with "Oklahoma!"

And, as it happens, made a pretty good job of it. Many a film director struggled with how to open up stage-bound material for the screen. Some didn't try (George Cukor in "My Fair Lady") and some improved on the original material through doing so (Robert Wise in "The Sound of Music"). Zinneman's efforts fall somewhere in between. The vast landscapes that serve as a background for his film contribute a realism that the stage version could never capture, but Zinneman doesn't always know what to do with the space he's given, and his transitions from scene to scene (that would have been covered up on stage through extra business and music) suffer from clunkiness. The score sounds remarkable, and those involved knew well enough to leave the original songs mostly intact.

Where "Oklahoma!" surpasses other film musicals is in its wonderful cast. Gordon MacRae could play a signing cowboy without making him twerpy. Shirley Jones could convince you with her soprano warble that she was an innocent country girl. Rod Steiger is almost too good for the material as the psycho Jud Fry. James Whitmore, Eddie Albert and Charlotte Greenwood have priceless little bits that they make the most of. And Gene Nelson and Gloria Grahame steal scene after scene, making you almost wish the movie was about them.

Most importantly, Zinneman knew how to stage a musical number and effectively capture dance on film, which is something Mankiewicz, whose "Guys and Dolls" came out in the same year, did not.

Grade: A

Back in 1957 I saw this film when it was re-released and playing as a double feature with Carousel. Talk about musical entertainment, you can't do much better than that.

With a few numbers cut, this film version of the legendary Broadway musical is a faithful adaption of the show that premiered in 1943 and set a record of 2212 performances in a five year Broadway run at the St. James Theater. Oklahoma set a host of firsts on Broadway, the first musical to have an original cast album, the first also in the partnership of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, II.

Oklahoma on stage was also daring in that it had an extensive use of ballet, something unheard of for Broadway. Well, not quite because Richard Rodgers when he was writing with Lorenz Hart had Georges Balanchine do the famous Slaughter on Tenth Avenue ballet for On Your Toes.

But that was not as long as the dream ballet of Laurie that Agnes DeMille choreographed for Oklahoma. Agnes had previously choreographed Aaron Copland's composition Rodeo for a ballet and was a perfect choice for the musical with the western setting.

Would you believe that Oklahoma's origins came from a flop play by Lynn Riggs called Green Grow the Lilacs? The first person to play Curly was not Alfred Drake on stage or Gordon MacRae on film, but Franchot Tone. It's the closest the urbane Mr. Tone ever got to a western in his career. June Walker played the Laurie part in Green Grow the Lilacs that Joan Roberts did on stage and Shirley Jones did in this film. Green Grow the Lilacs ran a total of 64 performances back in 1931. But Dick Rodgers saw the musical possibilities in it.

MacRae was a proved commodity, but this was Shirley Jones's big screen debut. She followed it up with Carousel again co-starring with MacRae, just as the era of big screen musicals were ending. To some of us she's better known for singing those Rodgers&Hammerstein songs than for being the mother of the Partridge Family.

The secondary characters in the show are nicely cast with the secondary romantic triangle of Gene Nelson, Gloria Grahame, and Eddie Albert. One of the songs cut is a number called, It's a Scandal, It's an Outrage that Albert's character, peddler Ali Hakim sings. Albert did sing on stage and screen occasionally, I wish his number had stayed in. All he got out of the film as we well know is a three day bellyache.

The songs of Oklahoma are part of our national musical treasure from the opening of Oh, What a Beautiful Morning to the rousing title song almost at the very end. On stage, Oh, What a Beautiful Morning is sung off stage with a farm house setting and the Aunt Eller character, Charlotte Greenwood, sitting and churning butter. On stage MacRae is on horseback, riding through a cornfield where you can really see the corn is as high as an elephant's eye.

Rodgers&Hammerstein also gave one state in the union probably the best state song ever written at least in my humble opinion. The infectious and optimistic Oklahoma is in fact now the state song of the Sooner state. You can't sit quietly and listen and watch that number when its on, I defy anyone to.

Another big hit is People Will Say We're in Love that MacRae and Jones sing trying terribly hard to convince each other they're not crushing out. A favorite of mine has always been the ballad that Jones sings, Many A New Day to cheer herself up when MacRae hasn't asked her to the dance.

The plot of Oklahoma is slight, a couple of wholesome young people playing courting games about a dance. The problem is that the brooding hired hand of Jones and Greenwood's farm is used to make MacRae jealous. That would be Jud Fry, played with appropriate menace by Rod Steiger. The method acting Mr. Steiger stands out in this cast, but he's supposed to, because he's not really part of the community of farmers and cowmen. Among all these musical performers, Mr. Steiger proves to actually have a few nice notes in his voice as he joins MacRae singing Poor Jud is dead.

It took over ten years for Oklahoma to finally make it to the big screen. It took home Oscars for sound and musical scoring. It was well worth the wait.