Oh, What A Beautiful Cinemascope!

I've never been one for musicals. To me, they're sort of surreal and odd - the way people just break into song in the middle of their daily life, strangers coming to join in elaborate dance routines. They just never gave me much of a thrill. (With the inexplicable exception of 1962's The Music Man. Don't know why but Robert Preston and Shirley Jones just worked for me.)

I had a boss once who was a Hollywood musical aficionado. He referred to White Christmas as "the apex of musical filmmaking." Largely, he made me want to claw my own eyes out when he talked this way.

I was in a musical production in high school - Barnum, the song-and-dance version of circus master and great flim-flammer, P.T. Barnum. My friend Tony played Barnum and, as ever, I played his assistant, Amos Scudder. It was fun but it was much harder work to produce than a regular play and a lot more nerve wracking to perform. When the mid-year musical auditions came around the next year, I just let them go by.

Anyway, since musicals are a huge part of classical Hollywood cinema, I have to embrace them somewhat for the sake of being an informed scholar. Last night Suzanne and I watched 1955's Oklahoma! It's two and a half hours long but goes a lot quicker if you fast-forward through some of the lengthier dance numbers.



While I still think the break-into-song nature of musicals is strange and I'm not likely to rush out to the theater the next time there's a Rogers and Hammerstein revival, I enjoyed the movie well enough. The leads were engaging, Rod Steiger was menacing, some of the songs were very catchy, and overall it was a fun departure from the hard-boiled world of film noir.

Because I am a sucker for pretty pictures, the best part of the film was the Cinemascope. The opening sequence that features Curly riding along side corn fields and through open spaces belting out "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" is really breathtaking. The colors on the DVD version are really vivid and the view, of course, is massive and gorgeous. I can't find the exact screencap that I want (or any good ones in color for that matter) but there were a couple of shots from the opening that feature Curly, the cornfields, the wide open country beyond, and giant, white clouds in an intense blue sky - all in one shot. You could see individual leaves on the trees, prairie grass blowing in the breeze, the curves of the clouds. The images were really wonderful.

More than anything else, those initial moments of Oklahoma! made me anxious for summer. I am done with below-zero temperatures and snow on the ground. I'm ready for some green grass and leaves on the trees. It's February now so we're in the final stretch. Once it warms up a little, you'll see me outside driving around in my surrey with a fringe on top.