ADAM: I seek a woman I do not know, yet already I will bless her skin
BROTHERS: let us dance and perform carpentry as an outlet for our sevenfold lust
*
ADAM: you will be a wife to me
MILLY: yes to only you and none of your relatives
ADAM: you will be a wife to everyone we live with
MILLY: no, only yours
ADAM: a wife to me and a servant to them, then
MILLY: steal for me six shadows, six twins, six simulacra of that which is of myself, to serve the house
bring me the women who will suffer with me
*
BROTHERS: we have produced a barn
now who will give us their daughters for sex and dish washing
*
BROTHERS: Brother, we are miserable as beasts, for we are surrounded by animals and trees, yet cannot mate with any of them
GIDEON: there is nothing to put sex in for us here
ADAM: I have learned from this book of the past that women are kidnappable
CALEB: I met a woman once
ADAM: perfect
*
WOMAN: I feign the child
WOMAN: I will also feign the child
WOMAN: the false child is mine
TOWNSPEOPLE: let them stay kidnapped
Tags: inaccurate recaps, movies, musicals, probably, seven brides for seven brothers
As an avid fan of this charming yet backwards backwoods musical I proclaim this both accurate and beautiful. Bless your skin, Mallory.
Er…”Bless your beautiful hide, Mallory”?
Something like that. 🙂
I…see nothing inaccurate about this recap, actually.
Dis movie – Stockholm Syndrome: The Movie
Also, this prime example of Tom and Lorenzo Musical Mondays: tomandlorenzo.com/2007/02/musical-monday-seven-brides-for-seven-brothers/
Follow it up with Beauty and the Beast and you’re all set.
100% on point.
Also, this feels like the right place to offer membership to my club of feminists who are nevertheless attracted to the way Adam sings “sassy.”
Oh yes. God, I am here for all of that awful, awful song and Adam, in general, in spite of my awareness of his awfulness.
haha what is this movie
*reads synopsis on wikipedia*
what is this movie??
The rape of the Sabine Women, I believe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Sab…
Which all the women enjoy hearing the story of so much, they keep making milly read it to them. I love to hear stories about kidnap and rape when I have been kidnapped, and may be at the mercy of seven extremly large men. LOVE IT.
The musical version of A Father of Daughters
this is accurate both in terms of the plot and themes AND ALSO the dead-eyed earnestness of the movie itself
That quilt skirt, though!
Wait, do you guys not like the movie for some reason?
i’m firmly on the side of ‘i love this movie even if it kidnapped me and trapped me in the woods wait wait i didn’t mean that please put me down FUCK CAN I HAVE THIS ONE THING’
Man, the only part I really hate of this movie is the Barn Raising Dance because it slows everything down and gives me a chance to think about the plot. If the plot of the movie is kidnapping woman, at no point should you give me a chance to really think about this.
However, it is at the Barn Raising Dance that we see a professional French danseur leap on a goddamned balance beam, so how can you h8.
You are right. I have reconsidered and have decided I dislike “Wonderful, Wonderful Day” more. For the same “it gives me time to think about the plot” reason and having no other redeeming qualities. Lovers of “Wonderful, Wonderful Day,” you can fight me, for I will not yield on this.
(but now it’s in my head)
I have literally never watched that scene, as my mother despiiiiiiiiiiised it, and hit fast foward on the VHS as quickly as she could.
Fastforward it every damn time.
Oh god but I love the dancing in the barn scene SO MUCH I just… I know it’s wrong. Dancing with axes! I hate myself for loving it so much.
The choreography essentially redeems the movie for me. IT’S THAT GOOD
THIS. I still can’t believe Gideon and Riff are the same person and the father of Amber Tamblyn.
(⊙︿⊙ )
mallory are you a witch
how did you make this 2nd most horrible Howard Keel movie not completely horrible
(also I know ALL Howard Keel musicals are terrible and the worst, so any ranking is pretty arbitrary, and how were all extant copies of the 1954 Rose Marie not burned to ashes along with bras in the 70s, but Annie Get Your Gun and 7B7B are my personal worst because they made me feel sick from the misogyny/racsim so that I couldn’t even finish AGYG and only stuck out 7B7B because it’s such a cultural meme. i even managed to watch Pagan Love Song all the way through, though to be fair it was really lazy in its racism and i probably wouldn’t have watched it through if i were actually giving it my full attention)
((also too I hate midcentury musicals with a passion but i’ve been forcing myself to watch them so that when I say this and people say “what about X?” I can be like “NOPE X IS ALSO BAD” and say it with authority and I think what happened is Howard Keel and Cole Porter got together and decided that nothing could top the stupidly awesome musicals of the earlier B&W era and therefore they may as well be 100% the worst so that we have something to grow from, and look! we did! we got Bob Fosse and Steven Sondheim and I don’t know who else.))
*looks up Pagan Love Song*
*boggles*
right???
i’m pretty sure they made Esther Williams wear brown make-up on top of her tan in many scenes in order to emphasize/fake her “half Tahitian” character identity. OR ELSE the technicolor process was really bad and made her tan look fake.
At first, you could almost think that Pagan Love Song is a satire of the “White Savior/Lazy Natives” story (the white guy is super lazy and useless), but then it plays it straight. But it’s so lazy about the racism that I hate it as much for its boring unoriginality as for the racism itself.
BLEHHHH I recently watched Annie Get Your Gun for the first time and kept nervously checking the clock towards the end like… “They’re not gonna…. they’re not gonna end it here, right? She’s… she’s gonna tell him to fuck off and keep shooting, right?”
Same thing happened with Kiss Me Kate (I was expecting the 10 Things I Hate About You ending I guess), also BLEHHHHHHHH
no, but I always thought these musicals must be awesome because they’re so iconic and everyone knows the songs, but i was horrified when i finally watched one about two years ago and saw the content.
the best thing to come from Kiss Me Kate is this performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8akvxDJQVc
also that is from the London revival about a decade ago
OMG the existence of that performance almost makes the Keel version worth it. I do like the Ann Miller “Too Darn Hot” even though it makes no damn sense in the context of the plot, and “From This Moment On” made me laugh because I couldn’t remember what Bob Fosse looked like and was wondering which one he was, and then he came out and did the Fossiest Fosse to ever Fosse.
If you haven’t seen it, Athena is an amazingly bizarre midcentury musical palate cleanser that also features seven sisters, but they are paired with ACTUAL BODYBUILDERS (like the finale is literally a bodybuilding competition). It’s like the Toast version of 7B7B.
There are a million things wrong with this movie. I love it .
“I met a woman once” is a completely accurate abridged version of how they come to the decision to abduct every girl in town. And of course they’re pining for them. They’d only ever met one woman who wasn’t related to them by blood in their lives before that point. They’d have fallen in love with anyone in a skirt who wasn’t already related to them by blood or marriage.
“A reminder: this is the first woman he’s met in his life who isn’t his aunt.”
Heh.
This movie is perfect and I will hear no complaints against it.
Bless your beautiful hide. Bless every beautiful hide. Amen.
no joke in high school my Ancient Greek class met outside of school to watch this movie as the first of many classically themed movie nights
You are right.
But I still like to sing, “Lonesome Polecat” when I’m doing the dishes.
And damn you Jacques d’Amboise for dancing so pretty.
But the choreography is so gorgeous! I cringe at the rest of it though.
This was my favorite movie when I was a kid and I feel super weird about that now. BUT… COLOR COORDINATED COUPLES! BARN DANCE! QUILT SKIRT!
Pretty sure my mom had to have a talk with me at some point about singing “Bless Her Beautiful Hide” in public.
I love this movie so much you don’t even understand. I prefer a misandrist interpretation of this movie where after the girls are kidnapped and Righteous Matriarch Millie exiles the brothers to the barn to sleep with the sheep, they develop a no-cis-dudes-allowed utopia. And they realize that their fathers and brothers and former suitors had been sexist douchebags all along, and choose from among the brothers those they have deemed worthy when the spring reawakens their sexual need, and then when the fathers show up to uphold the patriarchy and try to protect the fragile concept of female virginity the girls laugh in their faces and subvert the fathers’ own patriarchal worldviews to get their way while allowing the fathers to keep their shallow veneer of authority, and also avoiding bloodshed because down with the military industrial complex. And afterward they stay up on the mountain, completely cut off from the rest of the world for half the year, and develop their own infinitely superior society in isolation.
ALSO FUN MUSIC AND DANCE MOVES I mean come on!
Tiny Millie standing up to Giant Adam and his six Giant bothers is the best thing ever. Also women throwing snowballs with rocks in them. Basically, that whole winter of women just staying together, ocasionally gettin’ some when THEY feel like it (its sort of implied “behind the woodpile”) and shoving the blokes out of the way whilst they deal with childbirth is just the best. The Best. SASSY.
The Mormons, they *love* this movie. LOVE.
And this is perfection.
As weird as it is, this movie didn’t merit “standing on the coffeetable screaming”* treatment from little Elizabeth in that period of elementary school when my mother made me watch ALL the musicals. At most, I gave it a suspicious squinty glare and asked to watch Thoroughly Modern Millie again. I suspect the barn dancing made all the difference.
*that’s reserved for My Fair Lady. “THIS IS WRONG! HE WAS MEAN TO HER! SHE SHOULD HAVE GONE WITH FREDDIE” says five-year-old truthspeaker who much later read Shaw’s “What Happened Afterwards” and has felt horribly justified ever since.
Marry Freddie?! What an infantile idea!
What a heartless, wicked, brainless thing to do!
thank you for this, I did not know it existed and am now off to read all the rest of Shaw…
Yes, except Freddie? Kiiiiind of a stalker. Cute, but…I dunno, maybe meeting a girl for six hours and then hanging around outside her house forever was less creepy behavior back before people invented cable, when it wasn’t like he had anything else to do.
Eliza didn’t have a lot of good choices there, really.
Freddie is the WORST. this is my unrepentant belief.
sure, Higgins is a misogynist cad, and she shouldn’t (didn’t) end up with him either, but at least he recognized her for the glorious creature she was at the end. Annnnddd then she dumps him. *end of play* (even in the movie, it doesn’t say that she’s going to marry him. But I’d rather be a bachelor with Higgins [and tell him off to my heart’s content] than have to endure Freddie’s stupid simpering. YARGH.)
Yes but remember, I was five and Freddie was Sherlock Holmes. And therefore the only choice.
It’s true.
for some reason I HAVE NEVER RECOGNIZED JEREMY BRETT in that role. Mind perpetually blown. It may never be the same again……….I may have to reevaluate Freddie, which is something I have NEVER thought I would do.
Thoroughly Modern Millie is SO WEIRD THOUGH. Here’s Julie Andrews and Carol Channing and so much fun and also a SEX SLAVERY RING whaaaat? I saw it as a kid and later convinced myself I had dreamed the whole thing up until I caught it on TV one day. Just. WTF.
The elevator which can function only if one is tap-dancing in it made SUCH an impression on me. At 13, I went to summer arts camp on a college campus and INSISTED that everyone dance in the dorm elevator as it traveled up and down. Shockingly, we did not fall to our deaths.
Still saddened by the HORRIFYING Orientalism in that movie, especially since Millie made some kickass fashion choices in it.
Oh, we can be friends. Or at least our younger selves should be. I loved Thoroughly Modern Millie and 7 Brides with a passion, only later realizing how seriously messed up they were and dealing with it by deciding it was all Technicolor’s fault. Natalie Kalmus was wrong about muted colors! All the rainbows! All the gigantic skirts!
I too was an angry young feminist. I actually unplugged the T.V at calamity jane, and it took my dad about 2 hours to fix it. I Hope Eliza got her flower shop.
Padre: Right, do you four boys take these two girls to be your seven brides?
This was the first thing I immediately thought of when I saw this article… (Possibly my very favorite thing of all time).
Yes, please, now write this again but with all the songs and so much longer.
I fell down a Howard Keel YouTube hole and now I know he performed at The Queen Mum’s 90th Birthday. I assume she specially requested him because she had a gigantic crush on him in the 50s and no British man could ever strut around and sing like that, and she’s always been just a little dissatisfied with her life because of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W__9e9FkS38
Who in the fresh hell was the person who first thought, “hey, this would be a good idea for a musical?”
BEST MOVIE EVER.
I understood that Shaw wrote that in the life after the play, Eliza does indeed leave Higgins and marry Freddy.
It’s actually based on a short story in which Millie is in fact the super-Matriach who masterminds the kidnapping. So yeah. You can read it here. It’s pretty awesome. http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/benetsv-thirteen07…
I will never watch an actual barnraising, for fear there will be less leaping about in tight trousers and dancing with axes than there should be.
Oh my God, so much to say about this, one of my favourite movies EVER. The tiny corsetted waist which must have been an ASS to dance and sing it. The tight trousers on a bean with an axe, dancing. The colour co-ordination. Tiny Millie being “Sassy as can be”, hiding in a tree, stripping the men down (both physically and in terms of power) and ordering all the men to sleep in a barn for all of what looks like a really long, cold winter, whilst still making sure they do all the farming, chopping, hitting nails with hammers, etc. I did get preeeetty mad at the kidnapping scene, but Very much enjoyed snowballs with rocks in ’em. The film that reeeeally got my goat was calamity Jane. SO ANGRY. Annie Get Your Gun was probably the only midcentury musical I watched once, and never returned to, because it just made me angry, but also sort of really disgusted with this otherwise kickass woman.