‘Oklahoma!’ or — Psychedelic Psychopathology?
“Oh, what a beautiful mornin’!” Curly McLain (Gordon McRae) bellows as he rides along with a massive grin on his face. Yes, we can see that, Curly. In fact, the way Fred Zinnemann’s 70mm widescreen camera pushes through the corn to whack us round the head with the most astonishing landscape shots imaginable we can safely say that yes, this is indeed a beautiful fucking mornin’. Thanks for filling us in on that, Curly.
Curly then tells Laurey Williams (Shirley Jones), the girl he fancies, that he’ll buy her a surrey with a fringe on top… so immediately starts singing about that as well. However, turns out he has no intention of buying Shirley a surrey with a fringe on top and has only been gaslighting her through the medium of song. What a prick!
Curly then goes and visits the Williams’ hired-hand, Jud Fry (Rod Steiger), and tries to gaslight him through the medium of song into committing suicide for a laugh. It was at this point in the film I suspected Curly might be total asshole.
Jud also loves Shirley so when Shirley declines Curly’s invitation to the fund-raising dance for the new schoolhouse and accepts Jud’s offer instead this gives Jud hope. This hope, however, is also a lie, so we start suspecting Shirley might be an asshole, too. Hopefully Jud will kill both of them.
You see, Jud may be a ghastly creature covered in dirt who lives in a hut filled with hard-core pornography but at least he’s authentic and doesn’t go around singing manipulative lies to everyone. And any lack of refinement comes from an absence of proper socialisation so this lonely monster we see before us, this masturbating Caliban who’s wanked himself into a state of lethal resentmen…
Hang on! What the hell’s going on?! I always assumed ‘Oklahoma’ (1955) was a delightful musical stuffed with life-affirming show tunes, not a head-long plunge into social exclusion, violence and the debilitating effects of ostracisation. I’m baffled!
The decision to shoot the majority of the film outdoors in a format so huge it’s basically IMAX only adds to the baffling nature of it all, as well as raising a serious question — should musicals be shot outdoors? For example — ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers’ (1954) bristles with erotic life because everyone’s contained within a limited volume which helps insulate, and hence increase, the energy. ‘Oklahoma’, on the other hand, has such vast and dominating landscapes it’s like watching Ron Fricke’s ‘Baraka’ (1992). At one point Will Parker (Gene Nelson) bursts into a song and dance number and it wasn’t until after he’d finished that I realised he’d even done so because I was too distracted struggling to process the immensity of the mountains and sky behind him to notice (this is one of those musicals where you come out humming the cloud formations).
The 70mm widescreen frame itself also dominates our visual senses to an incredibly ridiculous extent, its overwhelmingly severe rectangular intensity giving it the look of a cinema format designed by Mies van der Rohe so it frequently feels less like we’re beholding footage of the great American outdoors and more like we’re looking at the Seagram building lying on its side for two and a half hours.
“Goodness”, I thought to myself, “can this movie get any crazier?” Turns out it can because just over halfway through Laurey takes hallucinogenic drugs and the film suddenly transforms into Masaki Kobayashi’s ‘Kwaidan’ (1964).
We’re firmly thrust indoors and any rustic naturalism suddenly gives way to a kaleidoscopic fever-dream of production design run amok, and it is jaw-dropping to behold. Splashes of blood red smear the heavens as time, space and sanity completely shatter and dissolve. Laurey finds herself trapped on a staircase leading nowhere as Jud lurches towards her, a galaxy of churning sexual rage floating above him. The choreography is minimalistic and angular to an almost Fosse like degree as we notice the women dancing in Jud’s hellish realm might be dead corpses, their clothing’s sickly greens and purples reminiscent of post-coital bruising. It’s a mind-blowing example of production, costume (those hats!) and make-up design that defies mortal description so completely it could be classified as ‘Lovecraftian’.
So does ‘Oklahoma’ work as a musical? I’m not sure it does. It’s too astronomical in scale to support any real intimacy. Does it work as an examination of individual and collective psychopathology, toxic masculinity, psychological abuse, chromatic insanity, topographical enormity and staggering production design? Oh god, yes. In that respect it’s stupefying, flabbergasting and utterly unique. The fact there’s singing in it is almost entirely irrelevant.
