There are many moments in "Oklahoma" when you want to jump out of your seat and shout for sheer joy,Gordon Macrae singing "The corn is as high as a elephant's eye" with magnificent disregard for the indefinite article,a daringly cast Rod Steiger intoning "Poor Jud is daid","Everything's up to date in Kansas City","I'm just a girl who cain't say no",I'm in danger of turning this into a list of songs but the film is so much more than a hook to hang the music on. Agnes de Mille's choreography makes use of stylised "western" dancing as its starting point then adds athleticism and grace in an exhilarating mix. Its great strength is in its apparent spontaneity,the sure sign of months of hard preparation.If there is a better choreographed scene than "Kansas City" in any movie musical I have yet to see it. Gloria Grahame,more usually cast as a gangsters' moll or a good-time girl has just the proper air of bruised innocence for Ado Annie with her wide eyes and slight lisp."I wanna say come on let's go just when I oughta say nix" is a brilliant marriage of words and music and she interprets it as if she was genuinely confused by her mixed feelings. A wonderful performance and the benchmark against which every subsequent Ado Annie should be measured. The young Shirley Jones brings an unprecedented freshness and joie de vivre to the role of Laurey at the start of a long and distinguished movie career.Her peaches and cream beauty graced the big screen for another 40 - odd years but never to better effect. I have reservations about the ballet which I daresay was avant garde at the time of the first stage production in 1943 but nowadays judged within the context of the whole movie seems out of place .Perhaps it was initially conceived as a sop to the culture commissars of the day in order to boost the film musical's attempt to be recognised as "art". It became a bit of a vogue for a short while in the mid - fifties but thankfully a rather brief one as neither balletomanes nor musical fans were entirely happy with the hybridised product. In an era when the word "great" is so over used as to become virtually meaningless,it is no longer sufficient to say that Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote some great musicals.You have to say that they wrote some superlative musicals. And "Oklahoma" was arguably the most original innovative,tuneful and influential of them all. I am grateful to all the considerable artists concerned in its production.
Review of Oklahoma!
