Carousel

A movie that recently started showing up in the FXM rotation that I hadn't blogged about before is the movie version of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical Carousel. Once again, I recorded it so that I could watch in advance of Yet Another Showing of the movie. There's one showing at 9:20 AM tomorrow (Jan. 22), followed by another at 7:35 AM Sunday.

Closing in on four years ago, I did a post on the Charles Boyer movie Liliom. Both that and Carousel are based on the same play by Hungarian-born playwright Ferenc Molnár, so you may already know the basic plot. Gordon MacRae plays Billy Bigelow, who at the start of the movie is up in heaven talking to the "heavenly Starkeeper" (Gene Lockhart), a fairly obvious sign that Billy is already dead. Apparently in this iteration of Heaven, when you die, you get the chance to go back down to earth for one more day, something which Billy hasn't wanted to do so far. But there's rumblings about some problems for his family left behind on earth. Cue the flashback....

Sometime at the beginning of the 20th century, Billy is the carnival barker for a carousel somewhere in coastal Maine. Billy seems unable or unwilling to look for any other sort of work, but for now since he's young it pays enough for him to live. He meets young Julie Jordan (Shirley Jones), who works in one of the mills, and the two eventually fall in love even though as with A Place in the Sun that might be a problem for Julie's continued employment. And it's not as if Billy really wants to settle down. For whatever reason he doesn't feel like he's suited to any other sort of work. To me this would seem like he's no prize whatsoever, but then if we didn't have characters lacking common sense, there are a whole lot of movies that wouldn't work.

So of course Billy and Julie get married, and Billy starts mooching off his cousin Nettie who runs a dockside restaurant. He picks up a friend who's a really bad influence in the form of Jigger Craigin (Cameron Mitchell). Jigger gets the idea to rob one of the men who will be transporting a whole bunch of money to one of the lobster boats, and that will be able to support both men for a while. That's particularly of interest to Billy, who has just found out that he's knocked up Julie.

Of course, the robbery goes wrong, and just before Billy can be arrested, he falls on Jigger's knife in an accident that kills him, which is why he's up in heaven now. He doesn't realize it, but many years have passed down on earth, and his daughter is now a teenager who's thinking of running off herself, and is constantly bullied by everybody else because of who her father is. Perhaps Billy can put things right.

Whether or not you like Carousel is going to depend a lot on whether or not you like the music and the dancing, of which there is quite a lot. Musicals aren't my favorite genre, so obviously I found some of the numbers going on a bit, even if the dancers are decidedly talented. The two best known songs are probably "June is Bustin' Out All Over" and "You'll Never Walk Alone". So if you're a fan of musicals, you'll probably like Carousel.