The New Pictures

Oklahoma! (Magna Theater Corp.) shows how far a man can go with one word of Choctaw. The Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein musical opened on Broadway on March 31, 1943, and enjoyed the longest run (2,248 consecutive performances) of any musical in world history. Counting the road companies (four) and the foreign productions (six), Oklahoma! was seen by more than 10 million and made more than $30 million. But that, as Rodgers & Hammerstein were well aware, was only the beginning. If Oklahoma! could make $30 million from 10 million theatergoers, what Mississippis of money might not pour back from the 13,520,000,000 movie admissions that are paid every year.

Rodgers & Hammerstein premeditated their killing carefully, and the screen version of Oklahoma!, which cost $12 million to make and distribute, seems sure to knock 'em dead in numbers perhaps without precedent--some observers are already predicting a $75 million gross. At least on the billboards, this dollarpalooza has everything that the Broadway musical had, along with Eastman Color, famous names, and a technique called Todd-AO--a brand-new, giant-screen process all its own. Oklahoma! will run at advanced prices (from $1.50 to $3.50) in 50 cities from coast to coast before it is distributed through regular channels.

And what will the customers get for their money? They will get what is surely one of the biggest musicals ever put on film. The Todd-AO screen is 50 ft. wide and 25 ft. high, and the picture lasts 2 1/2 hours with one intermission. They will also get a picture that, whatever its merits as mass entertainment, bears about as much relation to the Broadway Oklahoma! as a 1956 Cadillac does to the surrey with the fringe on top.

The play itself was far enough from the frontier it pretended to present, and the worst thing about it was the atmosphere of Park Avenue hayride: its coy, commercial pretense that its outhouse-and-leotards folksiness was the essence of America itself. With its first frames the camera swallows this pretension whole. As the hero (Gordon MacRae) rides into the picture, looking about as indigenous as Gene Autry, and singing in a well-schooled voice about the corn that's as high as an elephant's eye, the camera glides through what is probably the most expensive field of the native grain ever grown.

"Just any average cornfield wouldn't do," a publicity release explains. "To recreate for people the world of their childhood wonders ... the producers got an agricultural expert . . . October-maturing corn had to be raised by July 14 . . . 2,100 stalks. 14 neat rows . . . hand-planted, hand-fed, hand-watered . . . reached the skyscraping height of 16 feet." Not only is this hyperbolic flora somewhat higher than is necessary--the eye of the average elephant is only about eight feet from the ground--but also it is of such rich green pluperfection that it looks like nothing more than a cardboard imitation from a decorator's window.

Like corn like picture. The charm of the play was in its note, however falsetto, of meadowy romp and dooryard homeliness. But the demand of the giant screen is for size and spectacle. The figure of Laurie, far away and touching as she sings Out of My Dreams ("and into your arms"), becomes on the screen a colossal closeup in which the heroine's left nostril alone is large enough to park a jeep in. The dances, too, come far too close for comfort. Though Agnes de Mille revised them for the camera, they now seem more like sophomore scrimmages than witty asides, and look as if they have been a little too thoroughly through de Mille.

But in spite of its age and the fact that its 145-minute mass is sometimes dragging, Oklahoma! hollers itself home as a handsome piece of entertainment. The plot, to begin with, is just about perfect for a musical: cowboy loves farmgirl, sinister farmhand menaces farmgirl, cowboy kills farmhand, cowboy weds farmgirl, everybody rides into sunset. It is as simple and innocent as a birthday cake, in which the songs are set as naturally as candles--and dazzling good songs they still are.

Pleasant, too, are the color, the costumes and the settings, and Fred (High Noon) Zinnemann's direction is light and sure. Hero Gordon MacRae acts with a winning warmth and naturalness, and shows a voice as clear and flexible as any in Hollywood. James Whitmore, Jay Flippen, Eddie Albert and Charlotte Greenwood are good in secondary roles, but the real stunner of the show is the heroine, a 21-year-old newcomer from Smithton, Pa. named Shirley Jones. She has a milky, springtime skin, a creamy figure, and a smile like melting butter. Her brook-clear soprano is the best voice in the picture. In her next movie, Carousel, she will also co-star with Gordon MacRae and if they don't watch out they may become the Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald of the '50s.

The Big Knife (Robert Aldrich; United Artists) is one of the wickedest instruments ever plunged into Hollywood's always bleeding heart. Furthermore, it is twisted a few times, slowly, just to emphasize the point. The assassin in the case is Clifford Odets, the brilliant playwright (Waiting for Lefty) who lived right and thought left in Hollywood during the '40s. The deed he does here was originally perpetrated as a Broadway play in 1949. As a movie, it is arousing consternation, indignation and malicious delight among some of Hollywood's best people.

The story bears a vague, uncomfortable resemblance to Odets' own, and though no names are named, a lot of famous ears are already tingling. The hero (Jack Palance) is a prominent movie star with a career "out of the storybooks" and a bracing regimen of "health, hard work, rare roast beef and good scripts," but somehow he cannot content himself with life among the movie idles. The trouble is that he once had "idealism"--a quality that seems to have involved, as far as Odets is concerned, being out of a job and bitter about it--but he sold his ideals when he went to Hollywood, or so he feels, for the mess of modernistic pottage he lives in, and the inalienable right to Swedish massage. Now his wife (Ida Lupino) is leaving him, his contract is coming up for renewal, and he is beginning to feel like a spiritual gelding--"one of those witless, sold-out guys, sitting around the gin table, swapping phone numbers and the latest dirt."

Next cliche: he decides to quit, go back to New York, find a play he believes in, recover his self-respect. Enter the Big Producer (Rod Steiger), who would be the silliest ogre since Jack and the Beanstalk if he were not at the same time a frighteningly close caricature of a well-known Hollywood type--the self-made magnate who demonstrates in his person, as Fred Allen once remarked, "the horrors, of unskilled labor." Producer lays it on the line: sign the contract or go to jail (for the hit-and-run killing of a girl, committed while the star was driving drunk--a rap that was taken for him by a studio flunkey). Star signs.

Down and down he goes after that, saucing up all day and bedding down at night with his friends' wives, until one day the studio hatchet man (Wendell Corey) drops in "to throw the raw meat on the floor." The girl (Shelley Winters), who was with the star on the night of his accident, has been drinking fast and talking loose. "She's dishonest," somebody remarks. "She won't stay bought." The hatchet man concludes: "She'll have to be removed." Murder, however, is too rich for the star's blood. He lets the producer know that if anybody is killed he will spill his guts to the police. In a rage, the producer fires him. Free at last, but with no strength left to face his freedom, the star commits suicide.

The Big Knife, from first frame to last, arches with tension like a drawn bow. The Odets script, adapted for the screen by James Poe, has been beautifully grained and shaped by two fine craftsmen, and it takes every ounce of strain that Producer-Director Robert Aldrich leans against it. Aldrich gets striking performances from his actors. Jack Palance, a gifted portrayer of brute instinct, is miscast as a man whose problem is the loss of his instincts, but his intensity and sincerity propel the action vigorously even where they confuse its motives. Ida Lupino, as always, is a capable trouper; Shelley Winters makes an amusing roundheel: and Jean Hagen gives her some tart competition. Perhaps best of all is Wendell Corey as the sort of operator who has long since opened his veins, let out all the poetry and filled up with Prestone for life's long winter.

The bow arches, but when Odets and Aldrich let their arrow fly, it turns out to be little more than a schoolboyish spitball. They have a truth, but they make it seem like a lie by suggesting that the big bosses in Hollywood do murder in the regular course of business. It may be so, but the public will not believe it. Furthermore, the ideologizing is almost childishly vague. At the fadeout, when Ida Lupino stands there crying "Help! Help!" the moviegoer may wonder just whom he is being asked to help--a lot of unhappy Hollywood millionaires? As far as most moviegoers are concerned, they can all go strangle on their gold-plated Corn Flakes.

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