One of my father’s favorite movies
is “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”. It neatly encapsulates his world view: the
women are spirited and yet they “know” their places in the household, the men
are rugged and a little dumb but always right.
Everything’s solved with chemistry and songs, and even the heaviest of
subjects can be laughed about.
He’s also a John Wayne fan, are
you surprised yet?
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is
a difficult musical – and thus a difficult film - in a lot of ways. With groundbreaking choreography and the
considerable talents of Eleanor Powell and Howard Keel on full display, the book
is also painfully antiquated in just about every way you can think of. While
some have tried to paint the story with a revisionist brush and talk about the
female character’s escape from the world of their fathers into a world of
independence, SBFSB’s unmistakable references to the rape of the Sabine women
and its unrepentant belief that there’s no cure for kidnapping like a whole
winter in total isolation up on a snow-packed mountain makes it hard not to see
it as a promotional pamphlet for Stockholm Syndrome…with a really kicking
score!
The movie (and musical) concerns the
educated, ladylike Milly, a waitress and cook in a tavern in a booming town a
year north of the gold rush, who yearns for a world where she only has to cook
for one man instead of a whole flock of them.
When Adam, a rugged woodsman who lives far from that town where she
plies her trade arrives in search of a bride, he and Milly strike up a quick
relationship and within hours are married and headed back over the mountain to
Adam’s isolated cabin. Milly is
thrilled; she’s finally getting away from the endless drudgery of working at
the inn, to the peace and isolation of his cabin, where she will only have to
care for one man.
Adam’s a little uncomfortable with
this. Mostly because he’s hidden the
fact that he has six more brothers packed into his cabin back home, all of them
red-haired, all of them with Biblical names, and all of them bearing his
unfortunate last name, Pontipee. It
turns out that’ he’d picked up Milly to help him take care of them as well as
their homestead. The girl is
understandably crushed by the sight of the brawling, beery new kin and the
other menfolk are less than couth in their respondent kindness to her dilemma. Oh and her husband’s first request upon
bringing her to her bridal cabin is to demand she cook dinner.
Even though she’s disappointed in
Adam’s lack of truthfulness and his unwillingness to listen to her sense of
reason, Milly decides to stick it out – and she figures the only way to get rid
of these boys is to get them brides of their own. To accomplish that aim she pulls a Snow White
on them, demanding gentlemanly manners and kind comportment and scolding them
like a grown-up Wendy Darling. The gap
between her gentle intelligence and their complete lack of knowledge in the art
of ‘courtin’ is super-creepy; these guys are adults and between the death of
their mother and the arrival of Milly they managed to forget how to eat a meal
without burping at the table.
Because this is a big Warner
Brothers musical, Milly’s comportment lessons primarily involves teaching all
six boys how to politely ask for a dance, and once their toes are properly
tapping she decides that they ought to test their skills in town at the big
barn raising, where the boys vow to make good impressions on six girls they met
the last time they were in town, who had rejected each of them for their
socially awkward ways.
The boys instantly find those six
women at the dance, try their charms upon them and darned if it doesn’t
work. Heck, they all dance well together,
which in a musical always indicates love at first sight. Through the magic of Dance Osmosis, they come
to know each other. But there’s a problem: the women already have suitors, and when those
suitors object to these girls dancing with the brothers a brawl builds and
spills throughout the dance, instigated by Adam’s refusal to turn the other
cheek. Time passes, winter arrives, the
men all develop a bad case of blue balls and then sing a number about it
(Seriously, take a close listen to “Lonesome Polecat”. What do you think it’s about?). Milly
is dismayed by the group’s resultant banishment, worried the boys will do
something rash – so Adam immediately decides to take a page out of one of the
books she’s encouraged him to read – literally – and uses Plutarch’s story
about the rape of the Sabine to justify the brothers to do the most foolish
thing any mountain man has ever done; to follow their glands and sneak out to
the town, kidnap the girls and cause an avalanche that leaves them all
literally trapped together for the entirety of the rest of the winter.
Unsurprisingly, this goes poorly
for the men. Milly sides with the girls,
banishes the guys to the stables and takes the frightened women to her
bosom. Adam – pissed off that his authority-slash-idiotic
ideas (which he like, totally learned from her fancy book teachin’ OMG) have
been rejected by his wife – decides to stomp off to hunt in the hills for the
rest of the winter.
Winter wears on, and everyone’s
ornery. They solve this mass of
underlying tension between them through methods that successfully encapsulate
the movie’s very: by throwing snowballs with a rock tucked at their cores at
one another. Milly soon figures out
she’s pregnant, throwing another wrinkle into the linen, and for some reason
this softens up the other women, as they start imagining themselves June brides
and….winter mothers, I suppose? This
also somehow heals the rift between the parties and the courting begins in
earnest as spring finally dawns on the hill.
Milly finally gives birth to her
child, Hannah, and Adam is finally charmed into coming back to the family
fold. Miracle of miracles, looking into
the eyes of his daughter finally wakes him up and causes him to realize that
maybe the girls’ parents miss them, too.
He leads the group over the mountain to find the town in enough of an
uproar that they want to hang all seven of the brothers. The day is saved by an I Am Spartacus moment,
with all of the girls lying claim to little Hannah, and a shotgun wedding is
joyfully conjured up. Huh huh
patriarchal virginity standards are so adorable!
The movie’s biggest problem is,
frankly, Adam. A dud of a hero whose
rashness nearly gets his brothers hanged, whose stubborn inflexibility results
in him missing his wife’s entire pregnancy, who sees no value in the girls his
brothers want to marry until he looks at his daughter and imagines her in their
place. Does Adam learn anything? Does he realize that his unwarranted rashness
is a danger that’s damaging Milly’s dream of peace? Nope!
Deus Ex Baby saves the day, bonding him instantly to the child and his
wife and hey, all of the girls are happy in their new marriages, so his
kidnapping idea is completely justified by the narrative! Milly does get a slightly more civilized
husband in return, and hey, all of those brothers have finally gotten married
so she’ll probably have an empty house in six months after they raise enough
barns. So…win-win I suppose? But then again she’s stuck with a jerk who
thinks he doesn’t need to be nice because he already has a wife.
But what does Seven Brides for
Seven Brothers have to say about marriage?
Well, In the world of SBFSB, marriage is a stepping stone away from the
nest, and a brisk walk away from mindless drudgery and a key that unlocks the
secret world of the marital bedchamber. Sure you’ll be stuck baking all day Saturday
and doing the wash out in the yard and you won’t have voting rights, but you’ll
have sex, someone looking out for you, and a fabulous wardrobe from the Warner
lot. The problem is that even Adam and Milly’s
attraction is as shallow as a puddle; he likes her because she adds a
softening, genteel touch to the sausagefest that is his life, and she likes
Adam because he’s a ticket to peace and a deeper degree of freedom. The other girls too want to leave behind the
repressive, drudgelike patriarchal hell of their home nests, and so after
awhile the gross, awkward yet physically graceful men around them begin to seem
almost appealing. With Milly and Adam
there’s some psychological bonding that goes on and he tries his damndest to
adopt her value system. But in the cases
of the brothers and their brides a roll in the hay would likely dispel all the
curiosity and tension between the parties and everyone could go on their merry
way. But this is the (19)50s, the Code
is still in place, and Good Girls simply Don’t Boink Cute Guys Out of Wedlock;
the girls must marry the men, and so there’s a lot of artificial posturing to
convince us they really love these doofs. And love each other they do, so we’re told, even
though all parties are immature enough to go from hitting each other with
snowballs to snuggling next to a duck pond with no exploration in less than six
months. In a phrase it’s all about the
glands.
If you squint, you’ll see a lot of
that 50s attitude stuffed beneath the movie’s planks; the women are beautiful,
obedient housekeepers who aren’t total limp dishrags but are ultimately
placatable with the civilization of their partners. The men are strong but dumb yet consistently
right, and satisfied with a warm meal and cool, clean sheets. The threat of nuclear war, racial segregation
and World War II’s trauma are locked outside and kept at bay as if they never
happened. In that context it’s easy to
see how the retrograde world of SBFSB was a shelter, a bulwark, against the
world’s recent and current wounds; a panacea against the horrors of life
outside the theatre. Is it at all
surprising that it was the most popular film in England the year it was
released?
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