I honestly cannot decide whether Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is a fantastic movie or really horrendously horrible. So I am going to briefly describe what I find interesting aboutit and let you determine (comments encouraged!).

I love musicals, because they tend to replace causal logic with singing and dancing, and generally causal logic is a negative in films, whereas I consider singing and dancing to be positives. This film shows off the full extent causal logic can be done away in a musical plot, and it does so straight out of the gate.

The main character is a mountain man, who comes to town to get a wife. He manages to find a woman to marry him and go up to the mountains that same day, largely because of the quality of his singing. She gets up to the mountains and finds out he has six brothers, and she has to take care of them all. She ain't too much into that, so the oldest brother decides they all need women too (because obviously they can't take care of themselves). There are various hijinx while trying to collect these women, but since the boys are brutes they don't have much success. They go back up to the mountain and the woman teaches them all manners, so at the next country dance they can impress these ladies with their charm.

Of course the competition between them and the town boys really comes down to a dance-off, which the town boys only win because they cheat. The brothers all go to town later and kidnap the women, taking them up to the mountain. Of course the women don't like that they have been absconded with, and so they refuse to talk to the men. Still, there is an avalanche, and they are stuck up there all summer, and get to liking each other. There is a climax where everything is resolved... primarily through dancing.

While there is nothing truly more obnoxious than a singing dancing mountain man (I mean that seriously), the breakdowns in logic that this film seems to enjoy flouting have their inevitable charm. While the complete disregard for anything that can be considered normal sexuality is a bit too absurd to be "subversive" (I mean that in a good way), I'm sure that won't stop those keen to interpret messages into a film to find a progressive or conservative message in the constant sexual posing. God knows what message it is they will find.

I know there is a large crowd out there that enjoys camp, but I am quite definatly not one of them. Camp is usually developed from "exposing social codes," through absurd juxtapositions of these codes, as opposed to pure nonsense which exposes the abstract workings of the self through presenting sensory imaginings.

That may not have entirely made sense, but what I am trying to say is that the musical is utopian, whereas camp tries to prove that utopianism is false. In doing that it only proves that camp isn't very intelligent.

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