Rose-Marie

MGM's first CinemaScope musical is pictorially splendid, with what looks like on-location shooting of the Canadian wilderness, or a very good faking thereof. The lake and mountain vistas must have been spectacular on the big screen; even on a TV screen they're impressive. Also, the screenwriters dump the pretensions that marred the 1936 Nelson-Jeannette version and return closer to the 1924 stage story, streamlining it nicely and removing some of the clunkiness in the dialog. Only a handful of the original Friml-Harbach-Hammerstein-Stothart songs survive, but several of the new ones are by Friml, too (with lyrics by Paul Francis Webster), and one, "I Have the Love," is quite nice. Ann Blyth, while not credibly a backwoods French-Canadian, is lovely and with a fine set of soprano pipes, and Howard Keel reminds us again of how Hollywood underrated him--one of our most masculine musical leading men, with an easy understated acting style to back up his booming vocals. Fernando Lamas hasn't that much to do, and it feels unfair that one of Ms. Blyth's leading men has to be a good sport and just step back and let her love the other. And Bert Lahr may be a comic genius, but his and Marjorie Main's material is so rotten that you tend to forget it. Still, a couple of soundstage scenes aside, it's a gorgeous big-screen production, and not as dramatically inert as many other operetta-derived musicals. A very pleasant 107 minutes.

Not enough good things can be said about this beautiful musical, one of my favorites. It has the right combination of romance, conflict, suspense, tragedy, and comedy in the plot. The setting is in the colonial or exploration era of Canada, and the rivalry between English and French Canadians is evident.

The story is about Rose Marie (Ann Blyth), a tomboyish girl that her guardian Mountie (Howard Keel) tries to civilize. Rose Marie is grateful to him, but she truly loves the French trader Duval (Fernando Lamas), who accepts her as she is. The unrequited love an Indian girl has for Duval adds to the conflict and leads to the tragic elements in the film. However, justice and a happy ending prevail.

I commend Turner Broadcasting for keeping "Rose Marie" alive by showing it on the movie channel, but I would love to have a quality DVD version. I hope it will be on DVD soon.

The film has inspired me to look for the sheet music and script from the musical, and I am very disappointed that I cannot find a "Rosemarie" songbook. If any music and script publishers are listening, they should have the score and script of this film in print.

I well remember seeing this movie when it was shown in New Zealand about 1955. It was an enjoyable movie and my desire to own it on DVD was only heightened when I recently saw it on Turner Classic Movies. Regrefully most TCM movies in New Zealand are a bit blurry and the sound track had lots of 50/60 cycle hum in it. It would be nice if it was to be released on DVD particularly if a little care was taken in restoring the visual print and the sound track.

The original sound track for Rosemarie was a magnetic 3 channel across the screen and 1 surround channel. With modern sound restoration and enhancement equipment that is available today, there is no reason why this could not be restored to quiet a presentable 5.1 sound track.

It disappoints me to see many of the fine old movies reissued with excellent visual print but little care having been taken on the sound restoration when as a sound engineer specializing in old recorded sound restoration I know much better could be done.

when i saw Rose Marie i fell in love with it. it is a fantastic love story done in the mountains and with great songs, Indian Love Call is one of the best love songs i have heard. The scenery in the movie is to make you want more and want to be their. It is a fantastically done movie and the combination of Howard Keel and Ann Blyth was the best for this movie, since i saw this movie in 1955 i have never forgotten it and I have been looking for either a video or a DVD of this movie for many years. Please, please lets put this fantastic movie on DVD so that i may have a copy to join my other musicals of that era. They do not make movies like these any more. So again i beg of you please, please put with wonderfully fantastic movie on to DVD, so those of us who want it so much can have it.

Bears little resemblance to the (better) MacDonald/Eddy version, at least what little I can remember of it. Very much in the style of musical that MGM would do for the better part of the 50's, for better and worse. As such, it was fine. Would have improved had they cut the entire Duval/Wanda subplot and just focused on Howard Keel and Ann Blyth. Busby Berkeley worked on the staging of the musical sequences --his last major theatrical film until 1962's Jumbo-- but there was really only one short sequence which clearly bore his fingerprints: the one involving the Native American medicine man (Thurl Ravenscroft, best known for How the Grinch Stole Christmas) and a group dance centered around Wanda. In retrospect, considering Berkeley's Hollywood career as just about over, this was a fitting bookend to someone whose very first Hollywood job was on the Eddie Cantor musical, Whoopee!, faint echoes of which appeared in that aforementioned sequence. Aside from that sequence, the best part of the film was a comic number by Bert Lahr, doing a more up-tempo variation on his big number from The Wizard of Oz ('If I Were King of the Forest'). For me, this lost steam about two-thirds of the way through and never really recovered. And I didn't like the ending either. Well-produced, but still rather middling.