Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)

Directed by Stanley Donen

You’ve got seven young men, seven brothers, backwoodsmen, farmers, with their large and well-built cabin out in the wooded mountains, happy as larks, hardworking, strong and sturdy, living like the animals they are now that their parents have died, though they’re vaguely aware that something’s missing. When it comes to the decencies of ordinary civilized life, as dumb as bags of rocks. Then the eldest, Adam — what else? — gets an idea. He needs a wife! But does a woman need that?

Debra’s the one in our family who knows all about musicals, so I won’t encroach on her territory here by talking about the wonderful music in our Film of the Week, which of course I’ve chosen for its magnificent and highly athletic dance — how often, after all, does a choreographer get to invent dance routines to the music and the action of log-chopping or barn-raising? That’s what we’ve got in this boisterous and comical and red-blooded film, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. And really, how often do you get lumberjacks reading Plutarch? And to such benefit! Here’s the deal. Adam (Howard Keel, the deep-voiced raw-boned bass) goes to town for supplies and comes back married to Milly (Jane Powell). She’s got high hopes for marriage, but they seem to be dashed when all at once she’s confronted with seven men to cook for and do the laundry and wash the dishes and clean up after whatever their boots bring into the cabin with them. Not that she’s daunted by those kid brothers. “Good morning, my brothers,” she says, when she’s had enough of their living like slobs. “If you're looking for your outside clothes they're hanging up drying on the line. I came in before and got them. I couldn't get your inside clothes so I'll take them now.”

Inside clothes? What are they? “Our underwear?” asks brother Benjamin (Jeff Richards). Yes, that. “You’re winter underwear that you’re sleeping in,” says Milly. “You might as well hand it over because you’re not going to get your clothes or food or nothing till you get all cleaned up and shaved.”

Don’t we hear that sweet note of the woman who won’t put up with male foolishness? The kid brother gets nervous. “Where's Adam? We wanna talk to Adam!” says Benjamin. That’s too bad. “He's out plowing,” says Milly. “He had his breakfast over a half an hour ago. I got hot muffins waiting, crisp bacon, steak, fryer potatoes, fresh ground coffee.” Of course Ben can smell those in the air, and his belly must be rumbling. “Now do I get that winter underwear or do I have to come in there and take it off of you?” “Don't listen to her! She wouldn't dare!” says Benjamin to the other boys. Don’t fool yourself, kid.

I said there’s a lot of dancing in this film, and somebody who knows more about choreography than I do can tell us about that sort of dancing — my own knowledge of dance can be written on an index card, I’m afraid to say. But the real dance in this crazy and delightful film is the oldest dance in the world, the dance of male and female, with all their strengths and their foibles, their attraction to one another sometimes in spite of themselves, what makes the world go round. For Adam sees that it’s not going to work out if Milly’s got to make coffee and biscuits for seven men. What they need are seven brides! And how do you get them? That’s where Plutarch comes in. Yes, you heard that right. Adam reads to his brothers the account of the Sabine women. The story, which Livy also tells, is that after Romulus and his followers built and fortified their new small town, they saw that they weren’t going to last beyond their own years, because they didn’t have any women, and so they wouldn’t have any kids. The peoples roundabout them looked on them as ruffians — and, to tell the truth, that’s what they half were. So Romulus invited the nearby tribes of the Sabines to come to a big religious celebration, and at the festival, at a pre-arranged signal, the Roman men carried off the Sabine women, one for one, against the protests of the women themselves and their fathers and brothers. But it all worked out in the end, because before the Sabine men mustered up a military force to storm the little town, the women had gotten accustomed to the Roman men, who treated them very nicely, partly in order to make up for the uncouth way they wooed them. So the women ran out onto the field of battle and pleaded with their kin on the one side and their new husbands on the other, and the Sabines and the Romans made a truce. So Adam and his brothers go to a barn-raising in town, and that’s when they run off with six other women, sobbing all the way.

But the writers of our film didn’t come up with that business from Plutarch on their own. The writer Stephen Vincent Benet did, in a story called “The Sobbin’ Women.” And in Benet’s story, it’s Milly who tells the boys about the Romans, because even though she was a work-hand at the farm — just on the lee side of being a slave — she’s had a bit of education, and it stood her in good stead. In Benet’s story, Milly’s going to have a baby, and that means she’s not going to be able to take care of seven men. So then, she says, “If you can't do as well for yourselves as a lot of old dead Romans, you're no brothers of mine and you can cook your own suppers the rest of your lives." That settles it!

Enjoy this film for the dance of those two creatures so strange to one another, boys and girls, and vive la difference!

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