The Seven Brides for Seven Brothers Question

    I spend a lot of effort in this space trying to champion the musical genre as the peak of cinematic achievement. And so it sometimes surprises my associates to find out that, no, I wasn't at all raised in a household that particularly favored musicals. I wasn't the kid who went out for the annual school musical or anything. My environment wasn't exactly hostile toward these things, but it actually did very little to nurture my study of the genre. 

Cinderella (1950)

    I obviously had exposure through things like the Disney animated musicals, which absolutely had a profound effect on the larger musical genre. But I didn’t see The Sound of Music until high school, and I didn’t see Singin’ in the Rain until college.

    Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, though, it was just always there. And so I guess that's really where I got infected.

I'm referring to the 1954 musical directed by Stanley Donen with music by Gene de Paul, lyrics by Johnny Mercer, and choreography by Michael Kidd. It was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, winning for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture. This movie became a much bigger hit than it had any right being. Jane Powell, who plays Millie, explained in a 1994 interview,

“The movie was supposed to be a bigger budget picture. MGM didn’t really want to do it. Jack Cummings, the producer, wanted to do it so badly that they said, 'Okay, you can do it,' but they cut the budget in half because they were putting all their money into 'Brigadoon.'  'Seven Brides' became a sleeper and went on to Radio City Music Hall. They made more money on 'Seven Brides' than they did on 'Brigadoon,' and spent half the money!” 

           And the returns are considerable. Without the scale or budget of something like The Sound of Music, this movie feels like a remarkably well-oiled machine. Future civilizations are going to marvel over how we designed the barn dance the way we wonder how they built the pyramids. The film’s large main cast really comes in handy during all those major ensemble numbers when you have all sorts of ways to configure the subjects on screen, allowing for some stunning compositions. This is a prize musical.

          But in the modern discourse, the movie can find itself the subject of a specific kind of scrutiny.

    I had, for example, the occasional experience in my Intro to Film lab where I'd converse with a student, one who usually also had lots of family in the Northwest U.S., who grew up watching this movie too. And it was never long before they expressed some musing about how, "Gosh! Can you believe our parents ever thought this was an appropriate movie for kids?"

More exasperating, see also this YouTube mini-review of the film, “A wholesome human trafficking musical,” just overflowing with perspicacity. He recounts that the movie features a plotpoint in which a bunch of dudes effectively kidnap a bunch of village girls and haul them forcibly up to their mountain cabin to marry them. “Who needs agency, right?” (Or internal examination.) He also offers such revelatory insights such as “Did they seriously build barns this way back then?” and “When even is their bedtime?” 

Even so, I was surprised to find that there hasn’t been nearly as much academic discourse around the film as I would have guessed. Its Wikipedia page does not currently have a section on the “controversy,” as with something like Gone with the Wind or Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It was featured on TCM’s Reframed Classics series, but Googling “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers ‘Problematic’” yielded fewer results than I was expecting.

            An hour of scouring, and the most I could find was this blog post from 2009, conceding, “I'm too much a feminist to enjoy the story too much,” and then going on to admit, “but I was fairly surprised that the women have as much agency as they do in this film. If the film had concluded with the women explaining to their fathers that they choose to marry the Pontipees instead of a mass shotgun wedding I would have been more mollified. However, as a piece of entertainment, Seven Brides, with the help of Michael Kidd's unique choreography, does satisfy.”

Ken Watanabe and Kelli O'Hara in The King and I (2018)

          Seven Brides for Seven Brothers as a property hasn’t enjoyed(?) the same probing as something like West Side Story or even The King and I in part because there have been fewer attempts at large-scale revivals on stage. There haven’t been quite as many opportunities for exposure.

    The story has approached Broadway many, many times, but has almost always been turned away before it could leave a mark. Its life on stage has been stretched out by many touring and West End productions. This story’s hotspot isn’t really the streets of Broadway so much as your local community theater.

42nd Street (1933)

          Seven Brides for Seven Brothers also has a different composition than most other original movie musicals of the day. As I’ve mentioned in other musical essays, most movie-first musicals circled actual stardom of the stage and the screen. The characters of these films were aspiring movie or Broadway stars, and the backdrop was always very metropolitan and shimmery. That proximity to artifice and performance was part of what enabled the story to tap into music as a storytelling device.

            Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was definitely going against the grain by setting a fully formed musical in 1850s Oregon, but I think that was also part of what secured its unique but formidable fanbase. It caught onto a sect of America that absolutely feels with all the range of emotion contained in musical storytelling but is often passed over for the streets of Los Angeles or New York. And so when this crowd finally gets its own musical, of course it’s going to become a point of conversation at the Spring Farmer's Market.

            And the weird hermeticism around the movie’s following is honestly something its fanbase takes pride in. That’s part of the movie’s charm. This is a story that shows off what ripe bedlam ensues for those making their living away from the hustle and bustle of city living, and how entertaining that all can be. This is also, I suspect, why the movie makes some people nervous.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

            The film is embraced by a crowd that exists in the American imagination as being very out of touch with many modern social developments--this forgotten recess in which all sorts of dark and dangerous things have been allowed to mutate.

    And when I hear questions raised about Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, it isn’t really even within more erudite outlets. (Does The New York Times even know that this movie exists?) It’s with other people who also have family from Idaho and watched this movie with their cousins in their uncle’s cabin during the fourth of July. A lot of those kids grew up, realized their parents showed them a movie about a bunch of girls marrying their kidnappers, and decided that cutting ties with that movie is just a part of becoming more socially aware.

            The question I entered the essay with was basically “Could you make Seven Brides for Seven Brothers today?” But that specific prompt became less interesting to me as I went on. Because, no, I don’t think you could convince investors to make Seven Brides for Seven Brothers as a feature film today. I don’t think that the society that rejected Passengers would go for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. 

    But that’s not the only venue by which a movie might continue to be experienced and examined. And neither am I satisfied with how certain YouTube critics choose to read the gender dynamics within the film.

Does this film actually tell boys it’s okay to kidnap women? No. Are there still conversations to be had here just the same? Absolutely. But does this film about a bunch of dudes kidnapping the local girls to be their brides actually have a distinct feminist slant? Was it actually ahead of its time? Does this 1950s musical speak directly to the present landscape? Also … yes.

 

Wonderful, Wonderful Day

            Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is a musical rom-com set during the early days of the settlement of the Oregon frontier. A self-determined woman named Millie catches the eye of Adam Pontipee, a woodsman from up the mountain who has come down from his cabin to find a wife. Everyone tells Millie to stay away from those Pontipee boys, but Millie has a good intuition about him, and she accepts Adam’s proposal.

            Millie rides with him up to his cabin ready to start her new life with him, only to realize when she arrives that he is living with his six younger brothers, none of whom have any sense of decorum or good manners. Millie catches onto the expectation here, that she is supposed to take her place as the on-hand maid and cook for these seven men, but she absolutely refuses to fit into that scheme. She initially turns Adam out of their bed until she is satisfied to know that she doesn’t just see her as another farmhand. Millie makes real waves here in the mountain trying hard to instill good sense to these backwoodsmen.

            When the brothers accompany her to town, they are smitten by the local girls and ask for Millie’s help to woo them. This she does, teaching them how to win a girl’s love as they temper their wild side, and they learn that they have the capacity to be gentle and accommodating.

            Adam starts to feel threatened as his brothers grow more and more soft under Millie’s care. He eventually instills the idea that if they really want to get wives of their own, they ought to go to town and haul them up themselves. And so the brothers go to town in the dead of night and pluck the girls right from their homes, kicking and screaming, and drag them up to the cabin, an avalanche snowing them in for the winter.

            When the brothers arrive home with the girls, Millie is incensed with Adam and his brothers, declaring that if they’re going to act like animals, they’re going to live like it too: the girls will have the house to themselves while the boys sleep in the barn for the winter. Humiliated at Millie’s rebuke, Adam leaves the family to go spend the winter in solitude in his father’s cabin up the mountain.

            Though Millie maintains the division between the girls and the brothers, the girls find themselves endeared to the Pontipee boys, who begin to default to their more gentlemanly ways. The farm rallies together as Millie discovers she is pregnant, and she delivers a baby girl in the spring. The youngest brother, Gideon, goes to Adam at his cabin to tell him the news and beg him to reconcile with Millie. After some reflection, Adam returns and apologizes to Millie, ready to resume their marriage on her terms, and instructing the brothers that the passageway to town is clear now, and it’s time to return the girls home.

But the girls have grown attached to the brothers and don’t wish to return to the village. The brothers try to drag the girls back to the village just as the townsfolk arrive at the cabin. Misunderstanding the intentions of the brothers, a fight ensues until the town marshal hears Millie’s baby crying. All the girls claim it as theirs, and the misunderstanding is cleared. A wedding is arranged and the brides and the brothers are all married.

            When complaints against this movie are aired, it’s generally made in some sweeping statement about it being so good that we know these days not to kidnap women. Those old Hollywood movies sure were pROblEMaTiC, weren’t they?

            There is basis in reality for this idea. Given how hard society has worked over the years to push the needs of overlooked groups into the public eye and reshape what we think is acceptable, it makes sense we’d find discrepancies for movies made during that earlier time. With some films that gap is really, really obvious.

            An easy mirror to the questions brought up with a movie like “7 Brides” might be McLintock!, a 1963 western, which literally culminates with John Wayne chasing down his wife, played by Maureen O’Hara, as she runs down the city street in her underwear before grabbing her and paddling her derriere while the crowd cheers.

            Now, I already argued in my "Power of the Dog" essay that Mr. Wayne’s filmography was a lot more sophisticated than generally acknowledged. This film sees a less smoothed John Wayne than what we saw in something like The Searchers, which had loads of internal examination about Ethan’s brutality: McLintock is on one end of the John Wayne spectrum. (Though, even that comes with some stipulation. Wayne’s character in this film is a vocal advocate for the Mexican and Indian populations in his community.) I don’t want to spend too much time defending this movie—it’s not really my favorite in the John Wayne canon, in no small part because of the wife beating scene—but here at Films and Feelings, we are in the business of contextualizing everything.

            John Wayne swatting Maureen O’Hara’s behind is framed as justified, even comical, because her character is unreasonable and shrill. And in-universe, this is an accurate summation. I feel like it’s essential that we establish that she’s rude not just to John Wayne specifically, but basically everyone, especially characters who are lower than her on the social ladder. If she were a character in a Netflix show, there would absolutely be memes and tumblr threads telling this lady where she could shove that bonnet. She’s basically Rose’s mother from Titanic and Carolyn from American Beauty rolled into one character, the pampered face of snobbery that the movie opposes. 

A bedrock assumption of this film is that living on the wild frontier forges a kind of integrity and character, and that is lost when all your material needs are anticipated by city living. These two were once in love, but after she moved to the city she became snippy and unfeeling. This has a lot in common with the thought process that makes something like the Lex Luthor/Clark Kent rivalry make sense: Luthor stands for the ravenous corporate appetite that emerges in an urbanized landscape, and so of course smalltown farmboy Clark Kent has to swoop in and thwart his evil designs. In that vein, John Wayne swatting Maureen O'Hara's behind while she shrieks and squeals is supposed to be a kind of corrective action, the thing that stops her from being such a Karen.

           Now, the movie is obviously overstepping here and normalizing domestic abuse. If in The Lost City, Channing Tatum all the sudden decided “you know what, I think I’ve had about enough of you” and bent Sandra Bullock over his knee, that would understandably ruin our chances of rooting for their relationship and this movie as a whole. Just because something has thematic motivation, that does not mean it is in good taste to display it onscreen.

So yes, this kind of thing absolutely emerged within Classic Hollywood, both generally and within specific islands of work. But these data points are often used to talk over and invalidate entire branches of the Classic Hollywood tree. They make no mention of something like Charlie Chaplin using the medium to humanize marginalized groups, nor of the many movies that were actually far ahead of their time, as with something like Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious. Contemporary audiences want to reduce everything to a singularly positive or negative value. But the truth is, these movies often had both values in the same text.

           “Seven Brides,” for example, came out the same year as Rear Window. That movie has basically become the cornerstone for discussion on The Male Gaze for how it places the viewer in a voyeuristic position to fawn over Grace Kelly, this ice cream sundae of femininity, without fear of punishment or rebuke.

But it also puts James Stewart in position to reckon with how her uniquely feminine sensibility poses special assets with verifiable use that he and his male perspective would not give her credit for. Moreover, the situation of the film swaps their places, placing James Stewart in the role of passive viewer and Grace Kelly in the role of active agent. It has strong regressive leanings and strong progressive leanings. And that is how most old movies behaved: they had discernible backward parts, and discernible forward parts.

Gone with the Wind (1939)

    The most common impulse I see among fledgling film scholars is to simply flag the movies with compromised material and just ignore them out of existence, and I think that’s almost always a mistake. I go into this much more in my essay on Classic Hollywood, but part of existing in a complex ecosystem is learning for yourself how to parse through immature representations of important social issues, and that only happens if you are willing to engage with it firsthand.

            Even so, I’d argue that Seven Brides for Seven Brothers has much less in common with McLintock! or even Rear Window and much more with something like Miss Congeniality or even Passengers. In these cases, there’s a cursory reading that seems to uphold reductive gender roles, but review the math one time, and the whole equation becomes much more balanced.

           

 

“Gender Roles” and the American Legacy

            Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is basically a battle of the sexes, with Millie is the flagbearer for womanhood, and Adam for manhood. There's obviously a lot here that defaults to the historical preference for the heterosexual union as the central engine of society, which is sanding down some intricacies, but for the sake of curiosity ...

Australia (2008)

           Let’s imagine that these two ingredients, male and female, can be personified as two opposite but complementary forces. From the fountain of masculinity, you have independence, willpower, grit. From the feminine, you have community, sensitivity, tenderness. Men become the face for the wilderness, and women the face for civilization. These two cover separate domains, and yet something remarkable happens when they are brought together--she learns how to embrace the wild side, and he learns how to be a dutiful caretaker. And from their union, a home grows.

            And yes, we’ve known for a while that a person may or may not resonate with the traits that have been linked to their gender assigned at birth. (This is coming from the keyboard of a dude who watches lots of musicals, for reference.) But this is not a law of nature, this is a pattern within historical imagination.

    In the case of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, the deviations from this model start to emerge fairly early on. This is less about the two genders learning to meet in the middle and more about one side--the male side--learning to make room for something it didn't have before, something it can only get from the other party.

          This movie takes more or less the opposite stance as something like McLintock!. Here, civilization is the cradle not for snobbery or greed, but cooperation and harmony. This story shows how when men remove themselves from that, all sorts of barbarisms are allowed to proliferate. This is a story about what happens when a bunch of dudes who live way out in the woods suddenly have a woman from town coming in and showing them what it can be like to put in the effort to learn how to coexist within a larger group, starting with the romantic pairing of the opposite sex.

            And as the brothers let Millie work them over, they don’t lose their character, their independence. Their garb during the barn raising chapter has them each sporting bright, unique colors that make them stand out, that bring out their individuality. And if you’re going to tell me that balancing on the turn wheel like that doesn’t require optimal masculine strength … The discipline and determination it takes to pull off this mastery of movement becomes the best expression of masculinity these boys could ever ask for. 

            This is why the movie’s musicality is such an essential thread. The very construct of music and dance is the ultimate fruition, and the ultimate victory, of domesticity. Here, a bunch of scroungy Paul Bunyan brutes have proven that with the right attention, they can pull off something finessed, cultured.

            Sensitivity and tenderness are essential threads within this equation. Those are things that Millie in all her womanhood brings to the Pontipee family. But the film catches on to the fact that they are not the only elements here. Millie’s gentleness does not come at the expense of her ability to stand up for herself or to force discipline on a chaotic environment.

And we learn this about her very early on. The first thing we see Millie do is chopping wood with an axe, showing that she is accustomed to manual labor and supporting herself. The second thing we see Millie do is shove a dude onto the floor, presumably for disrespecting her. When Millie is initiated into the Pontipee family and feels due respect is not being shown, she turns over the dinner table. She knows her worth and is not afraid to demand that her environment recognize it.

           Millie is basically a nineties Disney heroine, and honestly her closest descendent is Beauty and the Beast’s Belle–the one Disney Princess the internet can never be mad at for long. You see that in their design, and you especially see that in the narratives they occupy. Both stories follow a strong-spirited and idealistic woman who is put in a position that tests her resolve and her morals. But in choosing to hold her ground, she not only creates happiness for herself, she purifies her own environment.

            One of the screenwriters, Dorothy Kingsley, recalled that they quickly figured out the story actually worked much better as they give Millie more to do,

“Stanley Donen called me in and I looked at the script and said, ‘The big trouble in the original short story is that the Howard Keel character is the one that tries to get all of these boys married off, and that's not right. The girl has nothing to do, and she's got to be the one to engineer all this stuff.’ That was changed around and seemed to please everyone, and we went from there.”          

Adam Pontipee, Mr. Manly Man  

          Meanwhile, Adam with his Davy Crockett getup and Howard Keel baritone-ness is presented as the ultimate portrait of masculinity. As such, he is also the voice that resists Millie’s feminine pull. The arc of the movie is centralized in his development as a character.

            They have Adam abstain from like the 1980s kind of toxic masculinity, which can be a point in favor of or against the film depending on how you look at it. It doesn’t force the male viewer to confront the more familiar manifestation of toxicity, but neither does it run the risk of accidentally celebrating it onscreen. A lot of Adam’s casual misogyny is framed as cluelessness, which is meant to make his behavior seem more tenable, like he genuinely does not know better. This is where the film’s real complications actually start to flicker through. We’ll get to that more later …

            In order to try to make the story more palatable, some commentators have taken the stance of Adam being the “villain” of the story. And perhaps they’re throwing the term around somewhat liberally, but it does feel like a bit of an overcompensation.

            Various revivals of the stage show have followed a similar thought by focalizing the tension specifically on Adam and making it clear that he is the contaminating agent in this network that is dragging everyone else down. The 1986 West End production adds a number for Adam after Millie banishes him called “A Woman Ought to Know Her Place,” in which Adam throws a kind of musical tantrum espousing all sorts of patriarchal-isms.

           The problem is, of course, the worse you make Adam as a character, the dumber Millie looks for having ever fallen in love with him. It’s the possibility of him turning a corner that gives this story its intrigue, and there is a threshold to how unlikeable we can make Adam and still make this situation interesting. A lot of the efforts to clean up the story just kind of move stuff around without really improving anything for anyone.

            As with a lot of film characters, Adam is unfurnished material. He has grown up away from the civilizing influence of women, and that has allowed him to mutate into kind of a chauvinistic ding-dong. “What do I need manners for? I already got me a wife.” But the trajectory of the story has him reckon with his shortcomings and make the necessary changes to become a decent dude, and that is where the story finds its grace.

           And it’s important that the film still has us root for Millie and Adam’s relationship. The hope we have for the human race—for men evolving into suitable partners for their wives—rests on Adam and Millie coming together. And we recognize that root of genuine love between, that spark of potential.

            Both Adam and Millie share this affinity for music. They both know what it feels like to be so moved by their situation, their environment, that the spoken word is an unfit vessel for their feelings. Even at his most chauvinistic, Adam’s inclination is to express his hopes and feelings through music. Meanwhile, Millie’s first number has her singing “Wonderful Day” as she romps through the trees and flowers, excited for the future that awaits her. The framing during Millie’s premiere number allows for moments for her to experience this onscreen alone, but just as often as not, we see Adam in the frame with her, signifying that they share this vision.

And likening that hope for love and family to something as timeless as the mountains and the trees gives this film something in common with The Sound of Music, still ten years out from hitting cinemas, in that it creates tremendous synergy from the timeless character of music, nature, and love.

            That becomes the basis for Millie’s fairy-tale romanticism. Explaining her why she accepted Adam’s proposal over many other potential suitors, she says, “I tried. Again and again I tried. I’d say yes to one of them, but an awful sinking feeling would strike me and I just couldn’t do it. When I said yes to him, I waited for that feeling to come, and it never did.” The rest of the film is spent interrogating whether this girl's dreams of love, family, and happiness were ever tenable.

And this wager becomes very complicated once Adam and the brothers do something very stupid.

 

The Kidnapping

"Rape of the Sabine Women" by Jan Steen

           “The Rape of the Sabine Women” was a mythologized historical event in which the Romans, realizing that there just aint enough women in Rome, stole a bunch of women from the Sabine people, with whom they were at war. By the time the Sabines can retaliate and try to steal their women back, they have fallen in love with their captors and beg both sides to stop the fighting. The two people then decided to live as one.

The movie transplants that same situation onto a somewhat contemporary time, even referring to the story in the text itself. Adam even hypes them up with a jaunty little tune, probably the catchiest number in the film. The kidnapping scene itself is also framed largely comedically. We are meant to take some humor in the way that the brothers just scoop these girls up squealing and haul them off in the wagon, like this is some kind of Tom and Jerry routine. But Seven Brides for Seven Brothers also does some things the Sabine Women story did not.

            There’s a crucial difference in framing, to start. A lot about Adam’s rationale about the brothers manning up to take what is theirs mirrors what we know about the psychology of male entitlement today. This is one area where the film has actually aged remarkably well. From reminiscing to the mythical good old days to writing this all off as “boys will be boys,” this all exposes just how recycled the dialogue around these things has been--and remains. The movie even makes a gag out of Adam literally mispronouncing “Sabine” as “Sobbin,” signaling that Adam is sort of playing around with words he doesn’t understand. The barbaric chord to the Sabine Women story is totally lost on him.

           Then there’s the in-universe reaction from our film’s protagonist. Millie immediately calls out the behavior of the boys, especially her husband. This is not framed like she is somehow overreacting or being unreasonable. The film is supporting Millie's thesis as we see the girls crying in their blankets and the brothers start staring down at their toes as the reality of their actions sets in. Our reaction to this development is not one of amusement or catharsis. It is called out at the first available moment. That is the key difference between this film and something like McLintock!. And that’s another essential piece here, the story expects everyone else to rise to Millie’s level. She gives no concessions and lowers no boundaries.

    I guess if there is an imbalance in how the film portrays gender, it's in the way that, yet again, the female character is positioned as the uncompromising standard for morality who makes no error while her male counterparts get to make all kinds of messes through the course of their arc. But I don't longer this thought for a couple of reasons.

The Professionals (1966)

   This portrait of the civilizing of the American West (that’s civilizing with a major asterisk, by the by) puts forth the idea that it wasn’t just cowboys and horses and guns that brought order to the frontier—it was women demanding that men act as their best selves and holding them accountable when they didn’t. No one really talks about this, but the old musical is one of those spaces that gave women credit for the role they play in the public arena. I don't see this movie as decreeing that women ought to be their husbands' life coaches. I see more as a correction to the popular narrative of the formation of American society, returning credit to where it's due.

Alicia Malone observed in TCM’s overview of this movie, “What saves the film is that you have Millie calling out the sexism. Millie is teaching the men how to woo women properly. She’s the one who admonishes them when they do bad things … Millie is the audience saying, ‘Come on, guys. Get it together. This is not the way.’”

            There’s always a part of the hero’s arc where, after making some progress or attaining some small victory, the good guy or good guys get squeamish and start to regress. This is the part of Good Will Hunting where opening up to Skylar starts to scare Will, so he starts sabotaging both that relationship and all his career prospects, devolving into the exact hoodlum everyone thinks he is. And it’s also the part where, after Millie has taught the boys how to stop being a bunch of philistines, they go and do the most philistinian thing of all. These actions emerge during a very specific part of the story’s arc and the characters’ development. 

Claiming that this film is saying that kidnapping women is okay, well, it’s kind of like arguing that Mean Girls is saying backstabbing, gossiping, and bullying are valid ways to make friends. After all, Cady does end up just fine at the end, and are going to argue that the petty rivalry between Lindsey Lohan and Rachel McAdams isn’t eminently rewatchable?

            The return scene is meant to be a deliberate reprise of the kidnapping scene, a rebuttal. It’s even preceded by Adam stirring them to action, as he did when he convinced them to go out and take what was theirs. Only here, he is preaching the opposite idea, having internalized what he was missing before. The movie gets itself into a mess, yes, and that’s where it sometimes loses its audience, but it absolutely takes the steps to haul itself out.

           Even so, certain players have tried to just sidestep the mess altogether. In 2021, David Landay, one of the scribes for the 1982 Broadway adaptation, actually rewrote the script for the show to make it more “palatable” for modern sensibilities. This script has the brides actually foil the brothers’ kidnapping attempt but elect to go with them anyways of their own volition because they’re just bored.

            I haven’t actually seen this production, so I can’t speak definitively, but I’ll admit the idea has me thinking that if we’re really that concerned, we might as well go the whole way. Are we so sure we need Valjean from Les Miserables to steal from the bishop before he can discover the transformative grace of mercy? What about a new version of The Godfather where instead of killing the heads of the five families at the end, he merely breaks their femurs and signs them up for jury duty?

            The story only works where there’s actual transgression involved. Whether we reject this story or accept it, this has to be done in its entirety. This isn’t like a 1950s Disney movie where you can just change like one scene in the remake, and suddenly the pRobLEmaTic is gone. If the film is going to explore whether or not womanly sense can bridle men’s worst impulses, you have to display just a little of men’s worst impulses.

            I could maybe imagine an ending where the brothers let the girls go to show they’ve really internalized these ideas, but something would also be lost. The question stops being about whether or not men can ever learn to build a home with women, and so I feel like that becomes a more ideal end to a whole different story with a whole different engine. There is something to be gained by having this bunch of backwood hooligans emerge as viable romantic candidates.

    What skeptics tend to be asking for from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is better articulated in something like 1986's Mona Lisa, one of my favorite takedowns of toxic masculinity. This movie follows a dope who's clueless about women and drops him into a sort of white knight position to help a call girl in distress. 

    There's this expectation that his rise to heroism is going to be rewarded with this romantic consummation ... only for him to reckon with her larger reality which does not revolve around him and his own fulfillment. He proves his newfound gentlemanliness as he respects her autonomy. Movies like this exist in an ecosystem with movies like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. They cover a territory from multiple vantage points, and you can have both perspectives. 

     Howard Keel actually revealed in a 1994 interview that a song was written for Adam, but never recorded, while he is up in isolation in the mountains and sits with the implications of his choices. It’s a shame the number never came together because it sounds like exactly the thing that would have tied Adam’s arc together. I also could have lived with a duet for Adam and Millie after they reconcile at the end.

    These are storybeats that certainly feel like they carry sufficient emotion for some kind of musical reckoning. When I think about how you could make this situation more tenable, I don't think it's by trying to water it down. I think it's more by keying in even more on the questions it poses about the hopes and fears surrounding love and becoming your best self.

            This all to say, it is kind of missing the point to argue that Seven Brides for Seven Brothers condones celebrates the abduction of women as a valid method of courtship. But I also don’t want to cauterize any discussion here. I don’t think people are totally off-base when they say that this film hits differently in the 21st century.

            The narrative fulfills its promise to balance its own equation—the brothers do a thoughtless thing, the main character makes a frowny-face, and the brothers start to do better. But you can’t really escape the feeling that the equation has been dictated in by some invisible author.

After all, the film has us imagine that after a bunch of men forcibly take a bunch of girls out into the mountains, the worst that happens is that the girls get a little homesick but then discover that their captors are actually really nice guys. This is consistent with the behavior of the characters within the film and the framework the film has set up.

Room (2015)

    But history has its share of situations of women being forcibly taken by men, and those stories, well, their conclusions make the ending of this film seem unrecognizable. Those situations become the basis of wrenching dramas or even horror stories, not musical rom-coms. We can’t really apply what we know of those case studies with what takes place in this narrative. And this is where you start to feel like, yes, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers feels like it is painting over something.

So the question isn’t really whether the film celebrates or condones kidnapping women. Rather, the question might be … is a musical family rom-com the best channel for this scenario?

But an essential question I always come back to when trying to gauge if a thing is “problematic,” is “Who is going to see themselves in this situation?” Or more pointedly, “Who will want to?”

            So, let’s ask ...

 

Who is This Movie For?

            Do we think your cousin-in-law who listens to Joe Rogan would ever admit to seeing Seven Brides for Seven Brothers? How would he feel watching the brothers shiver in their blankets as they waited dutifully for Millie to return their clothes to them? Do we think he remembers that part where Millie turns her husband out of the house, telling him “I can’t abide to look at you!” Does he confuse the ending with McLintock! and think it ends with Howard Keel tossing Jane Powell over his knees so he could swat her while the brothers all laughed and cheered?

          While I acknowledge certain pressure points within the film, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers doesn’t exist in the same danger zone as movies like Reservoir Dogs, Fight Club or even American Psycho. Movies like those may deconstruct the male fantasies of domination, but they also deliver imagery that these problem groups find very exciting. And I don’t think “Seven Brides” has that specific problem. Do you know how hard it is to get to watch a teenage boy to even watch a musical?

            Even at his most machismo, Adam is still a thread in a fabric that is very female centric—he is literally the first character to sing onscreen. Cousin-in-law Darrell will never accept someone your grandmother had a crush on to be his avatar. While I don't believe in putting any text beyond examination, I find the general fixation on this movie as a nursery for misogyny misguided.

Animal House (1978)

           The period of Hollywood immediately after classical Hollywood was much more hostile to feminine sensibilities and female strength. In response to the social turmoil wrought about by the 1960s and 70s, the larger American culture started to actively reject this wave of redefinition and wrestle the popular consciousness back into a state of submission–with an extra ounce of domination just to be safe.

    The 1980s saw a return to limited gender roles, only things were even stricter than they were before. The things that men got away with during this time, the things that were written off as natural expressions of masculinity, make movies like McLintock! seem positively genteel by comparison. This is where my mind first when trying to unpack where many modern blocks in social progress emerged.

Escape from New York (1981)

           That’s obviously not a blanket decree: this was the same era that gave us Sarah Connor, for example. But looking at general trends within film at the time, guys were buffer and louder, while women were herded into limited spaces governed by the male eye and the male hand. Male entitlement stopped being the launching pad for introspection or growth and became an end unto itself.

            And seeing certain recent developments within American culture, it does seem like those same impulses are creeping up on the steering wheel, trying to undo the progress that has been made over the last decade or so. And these players are ultimately fearing the same thing that the boys in “Seven Brides” were—they fear the loss of power that happens once historically oppressed groups are let in the room.

    The difference is ... their behavior can’t at all be attributed to ignorance. 

Goin’ Courtin’

FRIENDS (1994)

For centuries, it was a biological truism that if men ever wanted to experience intimacy with the opposite sex, they would have to do all the necessary work to make themselves a suitable candidate. They would have to earn the right to be a romantic partner. If they became better human beings along the way, so be it. There's obviously a whole lot more to a relationship than sex, but the biology of the matter underscores how courtship has served an evolutionary imperative. For the longest time, it has been necessary for the continuance of human life for men to civilize themselves.

But a number of social developments have allowed men to bypass that equation and throw a wrench in that design, and that has created all kinds of ailments that the human race has not developed an antidote for. Earlier this spring, Caitlin Flanaghan wrote for The Atlantic about the proliferation of online pornography. In her piece, “Sex Without Women,” she writes,

Everwood (2002)

“Before online porn, men had an obvious incentive to put up with the stress of dating, and they developed the social skills necessary to close the deal: enough resilience to ask a woman out, and then a second woman, if the first one rejected them; the drive to locate a clean shirt; and the skill to make conversation over two orders of chicken piccata. It could be awkward; it could be a nightmare. But whether the resulting attachment lasted half a century or a single week, one thing was certain: While the relationship was going on, they were not a statistic in the loneliness epidemic. They were humans in a world made for humans.

“But who needs to spiff up now? Porn will never reject you or look at you with a pitying gaze. It’s always there, it never disappoints, and you never have to dig through the clothes hamper for something that smells okayish. As Michael says in The Boys in the Band, one good thing about masturbation is that you don’t have to look your best …

    She makes the connection to voices like Andrew Tate that spring up in, and propagate, this landscape. 

“Tate is charismatic and mesmerizing, a perfect companion to the lonely masturbator. You’re not a loser; you’re a king! He provides hours and hours of online content warning men that women are trying to emasculate them.

The Misfits (1961)

"What he’s gesturing to is an old idea, probably more true than not: that it’s in society’s best interest for men to couple off with women, because women civilize men. When confronted with that notion, women reject it: Their job isn’t to civilize men. When men see the same adage, they feel uncomfortable (what man wants to be “civilized” by another person, especially by a woman?).

“But men taught that women are ‘barely sentient,’ there to be used and abused, will likely spend their lives alone.” 

Of course, we also know the consequences actually extend much further than all that ... 

    If maybe the driving concept of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers makes you do a double-take, I think that makes sense. But what's perhaps even more alarming is how the story actually works. The situation exposes the delicate grounds surrounding trying to become the person who thrives in paired companionship, but it also paints an optimistic picture of human nature's ability to persevere through unlikely circumstances.

       Trying to sort its politics alongside grosser depictions of gender dynamics, or with the actual agents detaching men from their drive to civilize themselves, that to me speaks to a lack of curiosity about how these things manifest across history, or else an unwillingness to explore a subject in all its nuances. The more I am confronted with the systems actively making men more course or insensitive, the less appropriate it feels to grill Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

South Pacific (1958) tries so hard ... 

          The common impulse in 21st century film analysis is to try to determine any given movie’s sum value as a purely negative or positive value. But that’s just not how items of classic Hollywood actually behave. They were complex, even contradictory. But that exact heterogeny of “did they seriously not know better?” and “wow, that actually aged really well!” is what makes them so useful. Learning to distinguish between the good and bad parts propagates nuanced, textured thinking. And if some other person disagrees with what those are, that’s just another opportunity to explore the nuances of social progress.

Another part of what that tells me is that the human impulse to try leveling the playing field has actually been a running thread in human art, human discussion for a long time. Even if these efforts have been imperfect or require a specific context, it brings me comfort to know that we are absolutely not starting from scratch here in the 21st century.

We have momentum.

            --The Professor