I recently — and randomly — watched the Academy-Award-winning 1954 musical Seven Brides For Seven Brothers. As the credits rolled, I said out loud, “Is it woke?”
Which is what I do now. I talk to myself about a word that defies definition. I’m pretty sure woke means “it’s okay to be different,” but feel free to disagree, not that anyone needs my permission. Meanwhile, I’m confident Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is NOT woke.
It is, however, a surprisingly brisk hillbilly opera that I love dearly, and not just because I’m a fan of musicals, America’s second greatest art form (the first being comic books), but because it is a colorful political time capsule, a work of art from that celebrates post-war America’s values, which can best be described as “yay white Christians!”
Is it brimming with peppy optimism? Yes. Is it misogynistic? Yup. Is it also toe-tappin’? You betcha.
Seven Brides For Seven Brothers came out when mainstream America was nostalgic for the 1850s when slavery flourished and average life expectancies were around 40. There were thought of then as the good ol’ days.
As America grew in power, the country became obsessed with pioneers like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Seven Brides For Seven Brothers capitalized on this trend, first on Broadway and then in Hollywood. Here’s my guess about its origins: the original producers bet that if Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! was a hit with one kiss at the end, how could they fail with a similar musical featuring not one but seven kisses?
That gamble paid off.
Named one of the 25 best American musical films by the American Film Institute — it landed at #21 — Seven Brides for Seven Brothers does not have the snappiest or most original score but has an infectious energy, infectious like cholera, which killed hundreds of travelers on the Oregon Trail. I dare you to watch it and not go, “yee-haw!”
The movie has a hallucinatory vibe, too. The frontier looks fake as hell and also strangely beautiful. I love the soundstage matte paintings of the Northwest mountains and the pastel yellows, reds, and greens of the town folks’ dresses. Then there’s the famous barn-raising scene, the John Wick of musical dance numbers, a raucous, boot-stomping competition between the town’s bachelors and the mountain men. The movie is worth watching for that scene where a dozen or so lovestruck bros gracefully frolic and fistfight amongst piles of lumber.
Directed by Stanley Donen, with music and lyrics by Gene de Paul and Johnny Mercer, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is about a gruff mountain man who returns to his cabin with a wife and inspires his six brothers to sneak into town one night and kidnap their very own brides. It is loosely based on American writer Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story The Sobbin’ Women, which itself was inspired by the Roman myth known as “The Rape of the Sabine Women,” which tells the story of Romulus and a band of bandits who plan to steal women and populate Rome.
Benét, who also wrote the classic The Devil and Daniel Webster, transplanted the plot from Rome to the American frontier but couldn’t bear to part with the whole “horny single men abducting women and holding them hostage” thing.
The movie stars Howard Keel as the eldest brother who arrives in town looking to trade and finds himself a wife; a fantastic Jane Powell plays that poor woman. Keel gets to sing the upbeat ditty “Bless Your Beautiful Hide,” a traditional “I Wish” song made slightly more macho than usual. Instead of a princess wishing for her prince, Keel’s manly woodsman Adam cheerfully lets it be known he wants a gal who is obedient and slender, with a “beautiful hide,” as if a woman is a kind of critter. However, Powell gets the movie’s best song, a bland-as-milk ballad called “When You’re In Love,” which is self-explanatory.
A young Russ Tamblyn plays one of the brothers, who you may recognize as Dr. Jacoby in Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Return. The rest of the cast is bursting out of their tight pants with enthusiasm and testosterone.
I mentioned the barn-raising scene, which Michael Kidd heroically choreographed, and he managed to stage a few more inventive musical numbers that mixed western two steps with polkas and waltzes. The man knew how to squeeze maximum creativity from a story about creepy uncouth bumpkins.
Seven Brides For Seven Brothers is charged with sexual energy, but the moral is clear: sex is purely procreative. (Well, mostly.) There is a pervasive horniness throughout the flick, especially the problematic night raid on the town and the kidnapping of girls. It’s played like a silly heist!
The movie is high-octane heteronormative propaganda. It is objectively hilarious, almost mind-blowing, that millions of people crowded into theaters wearing shit-eating grins and agreed that stealing women like pies cooling on a windowsill was romantic. Thankfully, there is a happy ending, which is also wild. The cold war between the brothers and their captives thaws, eventually, thanks to springtime and Stockholm syndrome.
Seven Brides For Seven Brothers is charged with sexual energy, but the moral is clear: sex is purely procreative. (Well, mostly.)
I want to be crystal clear because the internet gets off on misunderstanding even the most tepid takes. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is NOT WOKE because it’s peak patriarchy, a movie about straight white men doing whatever they want. Back then, it was Don Drapers all the way down. If you’ve ever heard someone who despises the woke talk about making America great again, they’re more or less talking about 1954. The concept of “consent” was as foreign as a vaccine for polio, which would be discovered a year later.
And yet I love this movie because I live in a diverse world of my creation, where I enjoy all kinds of art, from Seven Brides For Seven Brothers to The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Hedwig And The Angry Inch, to name two of my favorite films musicals ever. There are a lot of cringe details in Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, but at its best, it is a runaway wagon of love. Just ignore its monumental sexism. I understand if you can’t! But if you can, you’ll find the movie forgivable if you surrender to its undomesticated goofiness.
Maybe if enough people stream it, we’ll get a woke reboot titled Seven Hunks For Seven Sisters or, better yet, Seven Bros For Seven Brothers.
So, is Seven Brides For Seven Brothers woke?
Evidence For: It’s a rootin’-tootin’, feel-good musical about falling in love. Aw, isn’t that nice?
Evidence Against: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers takes place in a dimension where America is white, straight, and corny. And if you aren’t white, straight, and corny, then you don’t exist. The movie also thinks kidnapping is hilarious.
Final Judgment: By current cultural standards, the big-budget musicals of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s are NOT WOKE since they all promote traditional romantic relationships. Suffocatingly so. They were all anti-feminist and paternalistic. Watched in context, though, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is a folk fairy tale that ignores the suffering of the frontier and replaces it with hope. But it ain’t woke because it is oppressively conservative, just a towering monument to 20th Century heterosexual supremacy.