Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

Stanley Donen made this two years after Singin’ in the Rain. That film was about show people who knew exactly what they were doing. This one, from a Stephen Vincent Benét story with a screenplay by Dorothy Kingsley, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, is about seven Oregon farmers who do not know how to use a fork, and what happens when the eldest brings home a wife. It has some of the best dancing MGM put on film and a plot that treats a serious crime as a courting ritual. The film half-knows this, and the half is Jane Powell.

Howard Keel’s Adam comes down from the mountain singing ‘Bless Yore Beautiful Hide’ and looking over the women of the town as if they were heifers at market. Keel has a big, easy baritone and plays the boorishness straight, and that is right: the joke is on him, and Powell’s Milly is there to make sure. She marries him inside an afternoon, discovers six unwashed brothers waiting at the cabin, and does not cry. Powell is small and brisk and sings without a wobble, and she plays Milly as a woman who has taken a bad deal and decided to run it. The kitchen number in which she teaches the brothers to bow and hold a partner, ‘Goin’ Courtin’’, is a small pleasure done exactly right.

Then the barn raising, and for a quarter of an hour the film is as good as this kind of thing gets. Michael Kidd’s choreography sends the brothers and the town boys across planks, over sawhorses and up half-built walls, and George J. Folsey’s wide frame holds all of it; Ralph E. Winters seems to cut only when someone is in the air. Walter Plunkett puts each brother in a shirt of a different colour and each girl in a dress that answers it, so that fourteen people can cross a crowded frame and you always know which pair you are watching. Russ Tamblyn does back-flips across the planks, Tommy Rall and Matt Mattox trade turns like a duel, and Jacques d’Amboise moves like the ballet dancer he is. We sat forward when it started and were still forward when the barn came down, and we would show it to anyone who thinks they do not like musicals.

Then the story does what its title promises. Adam tells his brothers the old tale of the Romans and the Sabine women, and they take it as instruction. We will not describe how, but we will say what we felt: we laughed at Tamblyn’s face, and then we stopped laughing, and the film, to its credit, stops too. Milly’s anger is written as anger, not as a wife’s scold, and the brothers are turfed out to the barn to think about what they have done. But the second half needs the girls to come round, and it hurries them there. Julie Newmar, Ruta Lee, Nancy Kilgas, Virginia Gibson and Norma Doggett are given a change of heart and almost nothing else to play, and their suitors from town are not even given that.

The winter stretch has one more number of real quality. ‘Lonesome Polecat’ is six men chopping and sawing in the snow, sung slow and low, the axe strokes falling on the beat, and it is the one point where the studio’s painted mountains look right rather than cheap. Gene de Paul’s tunes, with Johnny Mercer’s words, are sturdy throughout; the scoring, credited to Conrad Salinger and Adolph Deutsch alongside de Paul, keeps the orchestra out of the singers’ way. Between the songs, though, the cabin scenes sag. Adam goes off to sulk in a trapper’s hut, and Keel, a large warm voice attached to a limited actor, is not built for sulking.

Set against Singin’ in the Rain, this is a coarser, louder film, and it is honest about that. The tagline promises singing, dancing and romancing, and it has the first two in abundance. The third is where it is weakest, because Kingsley, Goodrich and Hackett never decide whether Adam’s stubbornness is a flaw to be cured or a virtue the film quietly admires, and the last reel splits the difference.

It runs 103 minutes and carries a U, and the certificate is fair. Nothing on the screen would trouble a child; it is the parents who may want a word afterwards about how one goes about getting a wife.