Oklahoma!

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.

The story follows various characters in the Oklahoma territory at the turn of the century. Much of the drama concerns who's taking who to the big dance: Laurey Williams (Shirley Jones) wants to go with Curly McLain (Gordon MacRae), but ends up being asked by the creepy Jud Fry (Rod Steiger). Cowboy Will Parker (Gene Nelson) pines for Ado Annie (Gloria Grahame), but she's with traveling salesman Ali Hakim (Eddie Albert).

Charlotte Greenwood, with whom I am most familiar in her early talking picture days, shows up in several of these Fox musicals in supporting roles and adds punch to any part she takes.

This movie is notable for a few reasons. It was the first movie made in the Todd-AO 70mm format, a process so new that, just in case things went wrong, the movie was simultaneously shot in CinemaScope. Most theatergoers saw the CinemaScope version which was distributed by first RKO and then Fox, while the Todd-AO version was taken out by the Magna Theater Corporation as the first of the "roadshow" musicals that began to dominate the genre for the next 20 years.

Director Fred Zinnemann does a terrific job of utilizing the widescreen format, filling the screen with activity and beautiful scenery. The songs, many of which have become standards, are infectious if occasionally overlong, much like the movie itself. The performances are all BIG, too, from Steiger's method intensity to MacRae's wholesome hero. Lovely Shirley Jones makes her film debut and acquits herself well enough. Gene Nelson gets some of the best dance numbers, naturally. It may be blasphemous, but I could have done without the lengthy vocal-less dancing dream sequence. The movie earned Oscar nominations for Best Color Cinematography (Robert Surtees) and Best Editing (Gene Ruggiero, George Boemler), and it won for Best Score (Robert Russell Bennett, Jay Blackton, Adolph Deutsch) and Best Sound.

I emphasize 60 because the musical debuted on Broadway in 1943, even though the film version was released 12 years later.

An unforgettable score. Perfect singer-actors. Tantalizing cinematography. It does not seem to get much better than this.

The main thing I admire about Oklahoma is that like the Rodgers and Hammerstein adaptations that would follow it (Carousel, South Pacific, Flower Drum Song, and, of course, The Sound of Music), the movie was fronted by legitimate musical talent, unlike in My Fair Lady and West Side Story. Further, it was a movie that did not rely on major stars, Rod Steiger notwithstanding, to make it an enjoyable picture. (Lest you forget this movie 'introduced' Shirley Jones as Laurey. Lest you would also like to know, the stage musical Oklahoma debuted on March 31, 1943, which coincidentally was a birthday of Miss Jones (I won't say which one). Prophetic? Maybe.

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...

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.