The decision to hire Fred Zinnemann as the director of the film version of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical \u201cOklahoma!\u201d was peculiar \u2013 the director never helmed a musical before and was best known for his intensely riveting dramas such as \u201cThe Search,\u201d \u201cThe Men,\u201d \u201cHigh Noon,\u201d \u201cThe Member of the Wedding\u201d and the Oscar-winning \u201cFrom Here to Eternity.\u201d One would imagine that bringing in a veteran musical director such as Stanley Donen or Vincente Minnelli would seem more logical for a vehicle like \u201cOklahoma!\u201d \u2013 this would seem to be the job for an expert in the light and breezy, not in doom and gloom.<\/p>\n
But Zinnemann\u2019s predilection for the dramatic gave the frothy \u201cOklahoma!\u201d a sense of complex gravitas that was absent from other mid-1950s musicals \u2013 not to mention the original Broadway production \u2013 and when viewing it today, it seems more modern when many of the other musicals of the decade seem badly dated. Part of this was achieved in the off-beat casting of Rod Steiger (who transformed the character Jud Fry from a stock villain into an emotionally tortured untouchable) and film noir diva Gloria Grahame (who played the comic relief Ado Annie without a trace of wink-and-nudge farce, thus making her character\u2019s sexual cluelessness more humorously invigorating). Zinnemann might have taken the film into even darker territory, as witnessed in his unusual eagerness to audition non-musical young Method actors Paul Newman and James Dean for the Curly role. But under Zinnemann\u2019s direction, Gordon MacRae, a usually bland musical-comedy performer, tapped into hitherto unknown dramatic abilities as he plumbed Curly to find an insouciant malevolence that clouded the character\u2019s personality and motivation.<\/p>\n
Still, \u201cOklahoma!\u201d is a musical and not a melodrama, and Zinnemann responded to the material with an imaginative style that took full advantage of the widescreen format (the film was simultaneously filmed in the Todd-AO and CinemaScope processes) and vibrant rural locations (in Arizona, as Oklahoma proved oddly incompatible for the production). The classic score was wonderfully enhanced with boldly conceived outdoor sequences \u2013 \u201cOh, What a Beautiful Mornin\u2019\u201d and \u201cThe Surrey with the Fringe on Top\u201d are playfully visualized while the complicated \u201cKansas City\u201d dance number was staged with a large ensemble in an open air train depot. Zinnemann also provided expert framing for Agnes de Mille\u2019s groundbreaking dream ballet, which offered an astonishing avant-garde sequence laced with psychosexual menace.<\/p>\n
It also helped that the film brought in reliable performers to inhabit the broad roles with unapologetic hamming \u2013 Eddie Albert\u2019s oleaginous Persian peddler, Gene Nelson as the handsome but dim cowboy and the sublime Charlotte Greenwood as the earthy Aunt Eller offer a jolly presence to keep Zinnemann\u2019s edgier elements in check, creating the cinematic equivalent of a yin-yang balance. The biggest surprise was the film\u2019s greatest gamble: putting unknown Shirley Jones in the central role of Laurey. The young actress was not lacking in photogenic charms and a fine voice, and Zinnemann carefully guided her through the role\u2019s light comedy and difficult emotional turns, which resulted in one of the most startlingly effective film debuts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The decision to hire Fred Zinnemann as the director of the film version of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical \u201cOklahoma!\u201d was peculiar \u2013 the director never helmed a musical before and was best known for his intensely riveting dramas such as \u201cThe Search,\u201d \u201cThe Men,\u201d \u201cHigh Noon,\u201d \u201cThe Member of the Wedding\u201d and the Oscar-winning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":21560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1369],"tags":[1396,1394,1395,700,1391,1393,1397,1392],"class_list":["post-21558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-retro-cinema","tag-fred-zinnemann","tag-gordon-macrae","tag-james-dean","tag-musical","tag-oklahoma","tag-rod-steiger","tag-rodgers-hammerstein","tag-shirley-jones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21558"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21561,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21558\/revisions\/21561"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}