Carousel (1956)

Film: Carousel (1956)
Stars: Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, Cameron Mitchell, Barbara Ruick, Claramae Turner, Susan Luckey
Director: Henry King
Oscar History: Strangely, this is the only major Rodgers & Hammerstein musical to make it to the big screen that didn't score a single Oscar nomination.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I have started to be better about getting ahead of any movies that I want to see on Netflix or FilmStruck before they are unceremoniously struck out of the queue by the fate of copyright negotiations, which meant that I recently caught Carousel for the first time.  I hadn't realized that this was the only major Rodgers & Hammerstein musical to never score an Oscar nod, though I am such a completist I doubt I would have cared that I wasn't looking in on the OVP front, as I grew up watching Rodgers & Hammerstein classics at my grandparents' house.  Still, I'd heard so many odd things about Carousel through the years, and how it as a much heavier and stranger musical than you'd expect, so I was eager to check it out.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film starts with Gordon MacRae as Billy Bigelow who is, well, dead, which was a shock to me as I genuinely didn't know enough about the story to know this was told as a guardian angel looking down on your life kind of trope.  We learn of Billy's life as a guy from the wrong side of the tracks, who falls in love with a girl named Julie (Jones) who is a "good girl" who becomes enamored with his bad boy exterior and marries him.  Soon, he wants to go back to his ways of carousing with a married woman, but Julie becomes pregnant and he decides he needs to go straight once and for all, but first will pull off a heist to try and get money to provide for his child.  During the heist, he is killed in a fight, and Julie doesn't get to know if he truly loved her or confess that she truly loved him.  The film then jumps 15 years into the future, with his daughter a troubled young girl, and he gets permission to go down from heaven for one day to set things straight, with his daughter and wife realizing through his actions that he did love them, and that they will be all right.

The movie sounds schmaltzy and it is.  It's not a particularly great movie, if I'm being honest. It's wildly predictable, and the leads were both better when they were in Oklahoma.  I've never thought much of Frank Sinatra as an actor, but it would have been fascinating if he had stuck with the role of Billy Bigelow as I think his persona fits the part like a glove (he was supposed to be in the picture, but according to Hollywood legend his wife Ava Gardner demanded that he either come stay with her on the set of her movie or she was going to have an affair with Clark Gable...an anecdote far more interesting than anything that actually happens in Carousel).  Either way, while the music is lovely, there's not much there in terms of actual plot, and MacRae isn't a good enough actor to elevate such a crucial role.

That is, except for the famed "Louise's Ballet" sequence in the center of the movie, which is spectacular.  Susan Luckey performs a largely wordless dance sequence as the movie shifts from its first to second half, and it's a glorious moment of cinema.  I don't know that you'd quite get the grandeur of it without the confines of the movie, so I can't say that you should just go find the clip on YouTube, but the combination of the great outdoor shots (filmed in Maine, the movie's best attribute might be the fresh ways it finds beauty outside of a Hollywood backlot) and the splendid, heartbreaking dancing (where we learn so much about why she's a troubled youth) is really A+ movie-making.  Had everything in the film been this good, we'd have a movie classic.  As it stands, though, we end up with a really cool musical number situated in a humdrum film.

Those are my thoughts on Carousel-how about yours?  I know that there are a lot of ardent fans of this movie (Richard Rodgers counted it amongst his favorites), so I want to hear if anyone has any defenses?  And is this the best ballet sequence in a movie you've seen?  I'm partial to An American in Paris, but this comes close!  Share below!