The secondary storyline involves Gloria Grahame, cast against type as a promiscuous farm woman with a shotgun-toting father and two beaus, cunning peddler Eddie Albert and hick cowboy Gene Nelson. Nelson has the film's best line, "When I tell Ado Annie's Pa who I get most of the money off of, maybe he'll change his mind about who's smart and who's dumb." Guess you had to be there to appreciate it.
How others will see it. The audience, naturally, is expected to identify with either the hero or the heroine, or both, and hiss the villain Rod Steiger, who has a wonderful early role. This well-crafted movie has the right look in terms of cinematography and costumes, and the casting of the leads is also dead-on. The choreography drags only during an unneccesary dream sequence ballet scene, which substitutes a different girl for Shirley Jones, probably because she doesn't dance as good as she looks and sings.
The songs are catchy, and it is obvious much Tin Pan Alley craftmanship went into each syllable. It's all entertaining, often in an intended amusing way, since the Oklahoma yokels are ripe for ridicule by the 'more sophisticated' theater-going audience of Broadway.
How I felt about it. Which explains the stereotypes, such as shotgun weddings, wild hoedown parties, feuds between ranchers and farmers, and a corrupted court held in an informal setting, shades of Judge Roy Bean. All the girls are lovely, all the men are manly, and the word "Indian" doesn't appear once in the movie, even though Oklahoma was known as Indian Territory prior to statehood, which is when the film takes place.
What keeps the film from being a breezy bit of hayseed fluff is the menacing presence of Rod Steiger, the unschooled man-ape whose loner existence serves as an excuse for increasingly creepy behavior. Everybody at times wants things they can't have. The difference is that Steiger keeps raising the stakes, rather than throwing in a losing hand. But it's a good thing Steiger is present, or the film's suspense would consist of whether man-hungry, oddly-voiced Grahame will prefer the Persian Goodbye to the Oklahoma Hello. As Nelson remarks, "It doesn't seem to make much difference." For a supporting actor, he sure gets the good lines.