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The Taming of the Shrew, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, that Stockholm Syndrome... Stanley Donen prepares the irruption of Roman mythology into 1850s Oregon subtly, Howard Keel is bearded like a buckskin Neptune as he strides into town looking for a wife ("Bless Your Beautiful Hide"). No time for the amenities of courtship, the groom has sheep to tend to and trees to cut down, "you gonna keep me waiting five months just for your pride?" The chosen gal (Jane Powell) accepts his proposal as an escape from small-town drudgery, and warbles gaily across the plains ("Wonderful, Wonderful Day"). The honeymoon proceeds from her realization that she's become maid to a clan of brawling, scratching, uncouth mountain hayseeds with Biblical names, and builds to the smashed bed from The Quiet Man. (Peckinpah tells a different version in Ride the High Country.) Clueless about romance, the brothers are paralyzed with lovesickness after their first brush with the town belles, the old tale of the "Sobbin' Women" ("Rough 'em up like them there Romans do, or else they'll think you're tetched") fuels the bride-snatching raid. The barn-rising rumble is a marvel, though Donen's manipulation of spinning torsos and piston-pumping knees across the CinemaScope sprawl is inventive everywhere. "Goin' Courtin'" accommodates Russ Tamblyn's acrobatics as part of a horizontal whirlwind, "Lonesome Polecat" illustrates in a beautiful single take what Godard called Michael Kidd's "mathematical" choreography. "June Bride" has the captured starlets in their underwear wondering about the beds they're sleeping on, with the grinning sight of Julie Newmar towering over the other ingénues. The punchline is Faulkner's "shotgun wedding with the muse," surely. With Jeff Richards, Tommy Rall, Marc Platt, Matt Mattox, Jacques d'Amboise, Ruta Lee, Virginia Gibson, Nancy Kilgas, Betty Carr, Norma Doggett, and Ian Wolfe.
--- Fernando F. Croce |