Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

Adam, the eldest of seven brothers living in the Oregon mountains, comes down to town, marries Milly the same day and takes her back to the cabin. There she finds six unwashed brothers-in-law and sets about civilising them. When the brothers meet town girls at a dance and fall in love, Adam's advice turns into a disaster: they carry the girls off and leave them stranded in the valley for the winter. Stanley Donen directed. The source is Stephen Vincent Benet's 1938 story The Sobbin' Women, itself drawn from the Roman legend of the abduction of the Sabine women. The choreography is what the film is remembered for. Michael Kidd resisted the idea at first, unable to believe these rough men living in the woods would dance. His solution was to build the movement out of real labour, chopping wood and raising a barn, which is why most of the brothers were played by professional dancers. The lyricist Johnny Mercer described the order of work: Kidd conceived the numbers first, then Mercer and the composer Gene de Paul wrote the music and words. MGM gave priority to Brigadoon in the same period and cut this film's budget. The result went the other way: roughly 9.4 million dollars against a budget of 2.54 million. It won the Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture and was nominated in four other categories including Best Picture. It sits 21st on the AFI list of the greatest musicals and entered the National Film Registry in 2004. Who it is for: viewers who like classic Hollywood musicals and real choreography. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by a story that presents abduction as a romantic solution. The film plays it as comedy, and that is what it is most argued about today.