Revisiting ‘Oklahoma!’, A Problematic And Influential Technical Marvel That Reshaped The Movie Musical
By Josh Spiegel/May 11, 2021 10:00 am EST
(Welcome to Out of the Disney Vault, where we explore the unsung gems and forgotten disasters currently streaming on Disney+.)Hollywood’s eras come in waves. It’s hard to imagine now, because we’re still in the crest of the current one, but the superhero era is a wave that will eventually – yes, really, even if it takes decades – ebb. Before superhero movies, there were blockbusters of vastly more stripes, somehow managing to avoid interconnected universes or the like. The Walt Disney Company is at the convergence of the current wave, with Marvel and Lucasfilm underneath their vast umbrella.But right now, Disney+ is inadvertently giving its audiences a chance for a bit of a history lesson of what blockbusters used to look like, with the streaming arrival of the 1955 musical adaptation of Oklahoma!. Yes, it’s true, there was once a time when blockbusters weren’t about the world ending, but were about simple love stories given grand treatments.
The Movie
First of all, the important news: though there are really two versions of Oklahoma! (seeing as the CinemaScope version has different takes of every shot within the film), the one you can stream right now on Disney+ is the Todd-AO version. And your eyes may take a little time to adjust to that reality. It’s not just that the aspect ratio is different, making for an experience slightly less wide than the now-traditional 2.35:1 aspect ratio for modern films. It’s that Oklahoma! in Todd-AO was shot at 30 frames per second, not the standard 24 frames per second. The good news is that 30 frames per second doesn’t create the same heightened surreality of The Hobbit at 48 frames per second. But it does mean that Oklahoma! is sometimes unnervingly gorgeous, with sumptuous cinematography by Robert Surtees that soars through cornfields and depicts the lush beauty of the American West (though Arizona subs in for Oklahoma for the exterior shots) with a level of crispness rarely seen. The flip side is that some of the interior shots have a slight soap-opera feel, as if the facsimile of a movie set becomes faker at a higher frame rate. But largely speaking, Oklahoma! is a movie any cinematography nerd should watch, just to see what this now-defunct format looks like. When the overture and opening credits, both presented on black screens, end and the camera tracks through a cornfield to meet the upbeat cowboy Curly (Gordon MacRae) as he belts out “Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’, it’s truly thrilling to watch.Rodgers and Hammerstein’s status as musical legends was established with the set of songs they crafted here. (Disney theme-park fans will appreciate that a number of the songs in the film serve as instrumental background music in Main Street, U.S.A. in both Disneyland and Walt Disney World, too.) That aforementioned opening number, as well as the title track, “The Surrey With The Fringe on Top,” “I Cain’t Say No,” and others are permanently etched in popular culture. These songs are close to being as unbeatable as anything from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s later musicals like South Pacific or The Sound of Music, the latter of which you can also stream on Disney+. But you have to do a fair bit of compartmentalizing with Oklahoma!. The show was recently revived on Broadway (pre-pandemic) to massive critical acclaim, in no small part because the new version grapples with the reality that this story is…oh, fairly racist and sexist when you think about it for more than a few seconds. The story could be a simple enough love triangle – there’s Curly, the pretty farmgirl Laurey (Shirley Jones, in her film debut), and the rough farmhand Jud (Rod Steiger) who wants Laurey and is willing to resort to violent ends to get what he wants. But said story takes place in the turn-of-the-century period right before Oklahoma shifted from being a territory once belonging to Native Americans to a full-blown state of the Union. Even if you leave aside the full erasure of Native Americans and their culture from the story (both on stage and screen), you’re left with a story where women and men occupy very old-fashioned gender norms of the early 20th century. And there’s also racial whitewashing in the form of Ali Hakim, a Persian peddler played for comic relief by the very white actor Eddie Albert.In the same vein as I’ve asked in this column before, I would love to know – oh, the money I’d give to have the experience – how Disney and its consultants come to the decision of what films and TV shows do or do not merit the pre-show content warning. Considering that Albert’s take on Ali Hakim includes an accent best defined as Vaguely, Insultingly Foreign, and songs like the aforementioned and bouncy “I Cain’t Say No” are meant as a charming depiction of a woman who can’t resist spending time with lots of different men…well, what exactly would merit the content warning? We can argue about how effective the vagueness of that content warning is. They never actually explain to viewers what potentially offensive content is about to be depicted. But when a film such as Oklahoma! arrives on a family-focused streaming service without context of any kind, there’s a disturbing conclusion: someone at Disney+ is asleep at the wheel. Oklahoma!, if you can leave its outdated elements aside (and I don’t blame you if you can’t), is the progenitor in many ways of the next era of movie musical and worth watching for that reason too. With this film, studios would make splashy, expensive, and lengthy musicals, meant to make clear to audiences that television sets aren’t as transportive as a massively wide silver screen. Oklahoma!, including its overture and entracte, clocks in at just under 150 minutes, but that doesn’t include its intermission – many more musicals in the next decade-plus would push and move beyond the three-hour mark.
Revisiting ‘Oklahoma!’, A Problematic And Influential Technical Marvel That Reshaped The Movie Musical
By Josh Spiegel/May 11, 2021 10:00 am EST
(Welcome to Out of the Disney Vault, where we explore the unsung gems and forgotten disasters currently streaming on Disney+.)Hollywood’s eras come in waves. It’s hard to imagine now, because we’re still in the crest of the current one, but the superhero era is a wave that will eventually – yes, really, even if it takes decades – ebb. Before superhero movies, there were blockbusters of vastly more stripes, somehow managing to avoid interconnected universes or the like. The Walt Disney Company is at the convergence of the current wave, with Marvel and Lucasfilm underneath their vast umbrella.But right now, Disney+ is inadvertently giving its audiences a chance for a bit of a history lesson of what blockbusters used to look like, with the streaming arrival of the 1955 musical adaptation of Oklahoma!. Yes, it’s true, there was once a time when blockbusters weren’t about the world ending, but were about simple love stories given grand treatments.
The Pitch
The Movie
First of all, the important news: though there are really two versions of Oklahoma! (seeing as the CinemaScope version has different takes of every shot within the film), the one you can stream right now on Disney+ is the Todd-AO version. And your eyes may take a little time to adjust to that reality. It’s not just that the aspect ratio is different, making for an experience slightly less wide than the now-traditional 2.35:1 aspect ratio for modern films. It’s that Oklahoma! in Todd-AO was shot at 30 frames per second, not the standard 24 frames per second. The good news is that 30 frames per second doesn’t create the same heightened surreality of The Hobbit at 48 frames per second. But it does mean that Oklahoma! is sometimes unnervingly gorgeous, with sumptuous cinematography by Robert Surtees that soars through cornfields and depicts the lush beauty of the American West (though Arizona subs in for Oklahoma for the exterior shots) with a level of crispness rarely seen. The flip side is that some of the interior shots have a slight soap-opera feel, as if the facsimile of a movie set becomes faker at a higher frame rate. But largely speaking, Oklahoma! is a movie any cinematography nerd should watch, just to see what this now-defunct format looks like. When the overture and opening credits, both presented on black screens, end and the camera tracks through a cornfield to meet the upbeat cowboy Curly (Gordon MacRae) as he belts out “Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’, it’s truly thrilling to watch.Rodgers and Hammerstein’s status as musical legends was established with the set of songs they crafted here. (Disney theme-park fans will appreciate that a number of the songs in the film serve as instrumental background music in Main Street, U.S.A. in both Disneyland and Walt Disney World, too.) That aforementioned opening number, as well as the title track, “The Surrey With The Fringe on Top,” “I Cain’t Say No,” and others are permanently etched in popular culture. These songs are close to being as unbeatable as anything from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s later musicals like South Pacific or The Sound of Music, the latter of which you can also stream on Disney+. But you have to do a fair bit of compartmentalizing with Oklahoma!. The show was recently revived on Broadway (pre-pandemic) to massive critical acclaim, in no small part because the new version grapples with the reality that this story is…oh, fairly racist and sexist when you think about it for more than a few seconds. The story could be a simple enough love triangle – there’s Curly, the pretty farmgirl Laurey (Shirley Jones, in her film debut), and the rough farmhand Jud (Rod Steiger) who wants Laurey and is willing to resort to violent ends to get what he wants. But said story takes place in the turn-of-the-century period right before Oklahoma shifted from being a territory once belonging to Native Americans to a full-blown state of the Union. Even if you leave aside the full erasure of Native Americans and their culture from the story (both on stage and screen), you’re left with a story where women and men occupy very old-fashioned gender norms of the early 20th century. And there’s also racial whitewashing in the form of Ali Hakim, a Persian peddler played for comic relief by the very white actor Eddie Albert.In the same vein as I’ve asked in this column before, I would love to know – oh, the money I’d give to have the experience – how Disney and its consultants come to the decision of what films and TV shows do or do not merit the pre-show content warning. Considering that Albert’s take on Ali Hakim includes an accent best defined as Vaguely, Insultingly Foreign, and songs like the aforementioned and bouncy “I Cain’t Say No” are meant as a charming depiction of a woman who can’t resist spending time with lots of different men…well, what exactly would merit the content warning? We can argue about how effective the vagueness of that content warning is. They never actually explain to viewers what potentially offensive content is about to be depicted. But when a film such as Oklahoma! arrives on a family-focused streaming service without context of any kind, there’s a disturbing conclusion: someone at Disney+ is asleep at the wheel. Oklahoma!, if you can leave its outdated elements aside (and I don’t blame you if you can’t), is the progenitor in many ways of the next era of movie musical and worth watching for that reason too. With this film, studios would make splashy, expensive, and lengthy musicals, meant to make clear to audiences that television sets aren’t as transportive as a massively wide silver screen. Oklahoma!, including its overture and entracte, clocks in at just under 150 minutes, but that doesn’t include its intermission – many more musicals in the next decade-plus would push and move beyond the three-hour mark.
