Prepare yourself for the feel-good sex trafficking movie of 1954, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Let’s buckle in for a down-home romp with a bunch of strange ideas about how to court a lady.
Grab your best gal and hit the dusty trail, we’re in for a musical western. I think Hollywoood had like 3 title font types in the 1950s, and generic western block font was one of them.
Adam Pontipee, a lumberjack in 1950′s Oregon, wanders into town one day to trade a few animal pelts for a new wife. The general store owners are understandably horrified by the way he starts examining the unmarried females as if he were buying a new plow, and shoo him off to hunt for a woman somewhere off their property.
Howard Keel is the perfect casting for Adam, as he’s a 6ft 4in massive wall of a man. Even when he’s acting creepy as fuck, that face and voice make me forgive a whole number of sins cause I want him to destroy me.
Milly (Jane Powell), the local bar cook, feels the same way I do apparently, as she is so charmed by Adam she agrees to marry him after two very short interactions and an ultimatum that he doesn’t want to wait 5 months to court her cause he needs to get back to his trappin’ cabin. The reverend and his wife express their concern with the union, considering they know nothing about Adam, and they were hoping Milly would marry one of their kids. Milly was like, nah, I’m excited to bone this dude, and the reverend helps them tie the knot. Later, as Adam is riding his wagon through the town with his new wife, the General Store owner utters the best line delivery in the history of movies.
Milly tells Adam on the drive up to the cabin how excited she is that she’ll only have to cook for one man for the rest of her life. He bites his tongue, because, turns out, he has an army of brothers at home waiting for a woman to cook and clean for them. It’s always men like Adam who want a strong woman to fix their entire lives without doing any of the work to earn it…
When Milly is introduced to the other 6 men that will be living with her and her husband, and the deplorable state they had been living in, she hides her anger behind her smile and gets to work whipping her new home into shape. These uncultured boys show no appreciation to the work she put in all day to feed them, so she flips the table full of food and storms upstairs because she is a queen that takes no shit from nobody.
Adam sulks upstairs with the hopes of consummating their marriage, but Milly gives him the what-for, as she has now discovered Adam was looking for a servant instead of a wife. Adam decides to sleep in a tree, as that is the least complicated solution to his current problem of marrying a woman who demands respect. Milly, for some reason, decides she may have been too harsh on him (she wasn’t), and invites him back inside to break the bed frame.
The next morning, she whips the brothers in shape by dangling food in front of their faces. They repay her kindness by getting into a street fight with some townsfolk, which not only embarrasses Milly, but shows how much work she needs to do to get these boys married and moved the fuck out of her house.
Milly wastes no time, and gives the boys advice on how to court a woman in order to set them up for success when they all trek to the barn raising/picnic event at the end of the summer. They are receptive to her feedback, as it’s Jane Powell, and she’s charming and adorable and impossible not to love. Seriously, that smile can persuade anybody to do anything.
The Pontipee’s, dressed like the Monkees, head to the barn raising, and Adam is shocked at his brother’s new, polite behavior. The townsfolk women are also impressed, as they have 6 new clean-shaven, attractive, strapping men willing to carry their food from the carriage to the table. Once the townie men see how good the Pontipee brothers are at dancing, they know their days are numbered.
The barn dance is so fucking good. Even though I spent the majority of it nervous someone was going to break their neck or take an axe to the face, it is truly unbelievable the feats these men performed. Did they hire dancers or gymnasts?! The choreographer Michael Kidd had concerns when he was hired for the job, as the Pontipee’s were lumberjacks, and they needed to look “manly” when they danced. I think he succeeded, as these dance numbers are a perfect marriage of choreography and displays of athleticism. Honestly, I couldn’t pull my focus away long enough to take notes, I didn’t want to miss anything.
Also, peep a baby Russ Tamblyn (Gideon) getting dancing and fighting experience on his resume several years before West Side Story. The snap dancing in WSS does nothing to showcase what this man is capable of.
After the dance, the barn raising begins, and a “friendly” competition arises between the groups of men on who can raise their part of the barn first. The Pontipee’s have it down on lock, since they’re all seven feet tall and built like Oxen. The townsfolk see the writing on the wall and try their best to sabotage Adam and the boys by hitting them with tools and pushing them off of ladders. The boys take the abuse since Milly cautioned them against fighting, but fucking Adam tells them to nut up and instigates an all-out brawl that topples the barn, turns off the women, and causes Milly to cry.
The boys regret their actions, but Adam tells them to suck it up, because one woman is pretty much like every other woman. This logic doesn’t work on his brothers, and they continue to spend all winter lethargically cutting trees in snow. Adam tries to put an end to their misery by convincing them the best way to win back their loves is to kidnap and force them to marry them. He said it worked in a book about Romans that Milly had, ultimately proving educating men is a terrible idea.
This is a truly terrifying song that features lines like, “They acted angry and annoyed, but secretly they was overjoyed! You might recall that when corralling your steers. Oh, them poor little dears.”
That’s it, humanity cancelled, everybody go home now.
This rallying cry incites the brothers to go down to town and kidnap their crushes while they fought them off and sobbed. As they’re being hauled away in the wagon, Adam strategically uses the women’s screams to start an avalanche, closing the pass between the town and the Pontipee cabin. This not only prevents the women from leaving, but also hinders the townsfolk from going up there and rescuing them until the snow melts.
When the men return with the women, Milly is fucking livid. She relegates her brother-in-laws to the barn, and Adam runs off to the trapping cabin, because the two things he’s good at is being a dick and running away from his problems. I mean, good, he can live in the trapping cabin forever for all I care – fuck that guy.
The kidnapped women at first are terrified and upset, but after several months of being trapped on a mountain with nothing else to focus on other than their handsome prison guards, they fall in love with them. When Milly reveals she’ll be expecting a baby, the women, with their ovaries swollen and ready to pop, decide they want to get married. Catwoman herself, after wondering what man used to sleep in her bed, expresses her desire to get married in June.
Spring finally rolls around, and the girls act like how we’re all going to once the pandemic is under control, by getting their fuck on next to a group of birds who were obviously ziptied to a tree. Milly silently gives birth, and Gideon goes up to the trapping cabin to tell Adam he has a daughter. Adam tells him to fuck off, because, and I cannot stress this enough, he is the absolute worst. Gideon rightfully knocks his block off because he understands Milly is a strong, amazing woman that doesn’t deserve his lousy brother.
When the pass has melted, Adam returns home, because As A FAtHeR oF a DaUgHtEr, Adam finally understands that what he did was horrific, and he’s decided to return the girls back to the village. The brothers, at first, don’t want to give up their prize, but Adam convinces them it’s the only way to get their families permission to marry. The brothers quickly come around, since it doesn’t take them nine months and a baby for them to understand empathy.
The girls, unfortunately, don’t want to go back, so when the townsfolk mob finally arrive they witness the brothers trying to unsuccessfully corral them into the wagon. The townsfolk would have captured and hung the brothers, but they discover a baby on the premises, and with nobody copping up to its parentage, the reverend decides the best path forward is to marry everybody lest a baby exist out of wedlock. Everyone gets hitched at gunpoint. The end.
One of the more hilarious aspects of watching this movie on TCM was that they dragged three people onscreen before it started to acknowledge Seven Brides is problematic, but then downplayed that aspect by saying it was satire written by women, so if anybody was to blame for the mixed messages, it was them! My favorite bit was the guy who kept saying how he would absolutely allow his family to enjoy this movie, but then conceding he wouldn’t want his daughters to think this was an acceptable way to conduct romantic relationships.
Look, I get that movies made in the past are never going to live up to what today’s standard of woke is, but I don’t find it entirely unhelpful to unpack these storylines and analyze how they informed the viewers perception on what a healthy human relationship is. Adam is clearly painted as the villain in this story, and Milly is our hero, so I didn’t walk away from this thinking it was romanticizing kidnapping. While the brothers do end up with brides, it was because they showed kindness and love, not because they put blankets over the girls heads and fireman carried them into the back of a wagon.
What does annoy me is the expectation that all it takes is a good woman to fix a man. Why are women constantly set up to be responsible for men’s emotional growth?! Also, positioning getting married as the only way to achieve ultimate happiness is tired as fuck.
Anyway, this movie is kind of great even if it’s cringy in parts, sooooo… watch it and just keep in mind it’s a bad idea to sex-traffic women hoping they’ll eventually want your dick and enjoy the barn dance scene.