A tribute to Gloria Grahame

Grahame, a California-born babe, was boisterous on Broadway and big in Hollywood - but only for a time, less than ten years. She spent her fading days in Liverpool, flown back to New York by her children only hours before her death.

Fred Zinnemann, who directed Oklahoma! in 1955, always spoke fondly of Grahame: her feistiness made her his kind of (screen) woman, and his confidence in her is repaid when she belts out 'Just A Girl Who Can't Say No' and nearly stops the show for a second or two. A touch of the stage, even in a movie set on the prairies, is exactly what this gloriously boisterous film thrives on. It was made, of course, at a time when Hollywood feared the small screen - and this phobia, too, accounts for the warmth with which the industry temporarily embraced the optical process that producer Mike Todd developed for the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical.

Todd-AO-Scope was a hubristic enlargement of reality - just as Mike Todd himself was. The 'AO' stands for the American Optical Co, who pioneered the lens that enabled an image of Cinerama-like dimensions to span a single huge screen, instead of the three screens that Cinerama needed. (Todd had, characteristically, fallen out with Cinerama). Every scene, though, had to be filmed twice: once in Todd-AO and again (for protection) in Cinemascope, since there was only one Todd-AO lens then in existence. (The NFT is showing the bigger Todd-AO 70mm version.) Considering the technical problems all this involved, it was real bravery to cart cumbersome new cameras off to actual locations and shoot the bravura cowboy and farm girl dances, choreographed by Agnes de Mille, in the real Great Outdoors. Not, though, in Oklahoma! Oil wells had got there first - so Arizona supplied the ranches, railroad stations and the endless plains on which tiny hills look stuck like blue limpets.

Shirley Jones and Gordon MacRae played the rural lovers, and were made stars by it. But Fred Zinnemann's great disappointment - as he expressed it when he and I were co-operating on his pictorially stunning, but disappointingly reticent autobiography a few years before his death - was not getting James Dean for Curly the cowboy. Dean made a test: but it was thought his singing voice wasn't up to muster. Zinnemann always believed the test he shot survives in some New York vault - it may be a wonderful find some day. Rod Steiger, who plays poor Jud, the cloudy presence in the movie's silvery sky, is the upsetting factor in the casting. Steiger mistakenly insisted on searching for character, instead of simply playing one, turning Jud into a disturbed and isolated personality who'd be a prizewinner in any Method academy. He hangs heavy in a movie that hangs out its heart. That exclamation mark isn't just decoration.

Oklahoma!
Cert: U