Premise: Seven country brothers make ill-advised attempts to find brides in the 1850s.
The barn-raising scene. Good golly. It's hard to think of a better single dance choreography sequence in a movie. That alone make Seven Brides for Seven Brothers worth seeing. Had I hated everything else about movie, I still would've called it time well spent.
Luckily, I did like plenty of the rest of the movie. The songs are good. The performances are lively and fun. The movie is well under 2 hours which took me by surprise. Normally musicals end up being extra-long due to all the songs. Seven Brides is incredibly lean.
That has its drawbacks of course. Most of the brides and brothers are thinly built. There just isn't enough time to establish them all with more than a trait or two. The conceit about kidnapping all the future brides is hard to stomach from a modern lens. Rewarding the brothers for it sends a bad message. And it's odd to see a family musical based on an ancient Roman tale known as "the Rape of the Sabine women". To my knowledge though, this movie didn't lead to a wave of female abductions in the mid-50s, so I think most people understood that the kidnapping shouldn't be repeated.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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