Film Review: Oklahoma (1955)

**Spoilers and Trigger Warnings: There are plot reveals mentioned. Suicide is also mentioned.**

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In Oklahoma (1955), cowboys and farmers dance across the screen — literally — clean as a whistle, while corn as high as an elephant’s eye grows beautifully in perfect rows. Huge haystacks rest in open fields in a way that no responsible farmer would ever have done, but is nicely picturesque.

Oklahoma offers a bright, shiny, colorful, and extremely idealized bit of Americana, and, as a result, falls short of ideal with an extremely thin plot.

Unlike some movie musicals, such as My Fair Lady which placed dramatic actors in the main roles and either allowed them to do their singing best (Rex Harrison, who talked his way through most of his numbers) or dub over, as in Marni Nixon‘s singing over Audrey Hepburn‘s lip-synching, Oklahoma placed legitimate singers in most of the roles.

(The one exception noted was the hokey and off-key Gloria Graham in the role of sex-obsessed Ado Annie, whose performances reportedly had to be edited, practically note for note splicing in order to get a decent track thanks to her literal tone-deafness). 

As a result, the acting for the most part is a broad, exaggerated swagger and swish. Bringing quality acting talent to the screen are Eddie Albert, as the itinerant peddler Ali Hakim and James Whitmore as Ado Annie’s Dad.

Along with, most notably, Rod Steiger as the story’s villain, slovenly farm hand Jud Frye. Steiger infuses real emotional gravitas into the role, creating a violent brute whose loneliness elicits legitimate sympathy. 

In one of the strangest sequences in the film, Gordon MacRae‘s Curly visits Jud — his rival for the affections of Laurey Williams, played by Shirley Jones — at the smokehouse where he bunks, and sings a song all about Jud committing suicide and being dead and the things that are said about him now that he’s gone.

It’s a strangely cruel sort of taunt, a little out of character even for Curly’s arrogant and boastful posturing, with his playing approach-avoidance with Laurey, which gives Jud the opportunity to ask her out in the first place.

It’s an incredibly contrived love triangle which is clearly there to add some sort of dramatic tension to a story that is so squeaky clean that, at a local dance, the company sings about how cowboys and farmers ought to be friends.

The song makes a bit of an historical nod to the sometimes vicious real-world range wars that took place in the unincorporated territories between cattle ranchers and homesteaders.

One thing is for sure; the tunes are catchy, and they stick in your head long after the film is done. Surrey With the Fringe On Top; Oh, What A Beautiful Morning; People Will Say We’re In Love, and of course the titular Oklahoma, are all bright, bouncy numbers that get you tapping your feet.

Oklahoma is clearly centered on singing and dancing — so much so, that smack in the middle of a hefty two hour and twenty minute film, a fourteen minute dream sequence of modern ballet whisks professional dancers standing in for Jones and MacRae across the stage through other-worldly choreography crafted by Agnes DeMille.

Director Fred Zinneman shows a good grasp on staging musical dance numbers for film, and the often-jolting breaks into song and dance, which unfold on the screen without being constricted by the camera.

The unreality of it is palpable, and the use of real-world locations for much of the action, intercut with sound-stage scenarios, nearly adds a frisson of the surreal to the entire proceedings. 

Ultimately, the film is a cavalcade of production numbers interspersed with dramatic action, all of it as superficial and tissue thin as a sheet of spun sugar. The film is so uninvested in its dramatic plot that an utterly anticlimactic, and ridiculously rushed, denouement is crammed into the space between the singing of the title song and the final credit roll, just to wrap things up.  

Oklahoma is an example of the Golden Age, Classic Broadway Musical, coming as it did near the end of that era. The team of Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones went on to make only one more musical together, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel (an even more depressing and dark tale). Jones, of course, is now more well-known as the singing Mom of the TV pop group The Partridge Family.

It’s hard to fault the movie for what it is, coming as it did in its era, but for this viewer, it did little to dent my mild antipathy to musical theater in general.

But some of those tunes are still bounding around in my head, for what it’s worth. And this musical helped my appreciation of other musicals expand, which you’ll see in my companion review of Fiddler on the Roof (coming soon).

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