# Oklahoma! (1955 film)
**Oklahoma!** (1955) is an American musical film directed by [Fred Zinnemann](https://www.edgepedia.org/fred-zinnemann), adapted from the 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical, itself based on Lynn Riggs's play *Green Grow the Lilacs* (1931). It was the first film shot and presented in the Todd-AO 70mm widescreen format, but not the first to use a roadshow-style release, premiering at the Rivoli Theatre in New York City on October 11, 1955.[1](https://rodgersandhammerstein.com/production/oklahoma/1955-motion-picture/) • [13](https://www.alexfilmsociety.org/newsletters/Lawrence_VOT_V14_3_WEB.pdf)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Premiere | Rivoli Theatre, New York City, October 11, 1955; Magna considered October 13 the official public premiere[1](https://rodgersandhammerstein.com/production/oklahoma/1955-motion-picture/) • [2](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/51607-OKLAHOMA?cp=1&pos=0&sid=8a5cce24-d634-4d1f-816b-6b2e141fdb7e&sr=13.706038) |
| Format | First film shot and shown in Todd-AO 70mm (65mm negative, 30 frames per second); also shot in 35mm CinemaScope, giving two distinct versions[1](https://rodgersandhammerstein.com/production/oklahoma/1955-motion-picture/) • [3](https://www.oscars.org/events/oklahoma) |
| Director and producer | Fred Zinnemann, who had never directed a musical before; producer Arthur Hornblow Jr., with Rodgers and Hammerstein as executive producers[4](https://playbill.com/article/from-rehearsal-to-production-celebrate-65-years-of-oklahoma-on-screen) • [5](https://www.nndb.com/films/627/000040507/) |
| Principal cast | Gordon MacRae (Curly), Shirley Jones (Laurey, her film debut), Rod Steiger (Jud Fry), Gloria Grahame (Ado Annie), Gene Nelson (Will Parker), Charlotte Greenwood (Aunt Eller), Eddie Albert (Ali Hakim)[3](https://www.oscars.org/events/oklahoma) • [6](https://www.tcm.com/watchtcm/titles/85454) |
| Cost and length | Seven million dollars, the most expensive film made to that time; 145 minutes[7](https://www.tcm.com/articles/18550/oklahoma-1955) • [3](https://www.oscars.org/events/oklahoma) |
| Academy Awards | Two wins from four nominations: Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture (Robert Russell Bennett, Jay Blackton, Adolph Deutsch) and Best Sound, Recording (Fred Hynes)[1](https://rodgersandhammerstein.com/production/oklahoma/1955-motion-picture/) |
| Preservation | Inducted into the National Film Registry in 2007[8](https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-film-preservation-board/film-registry/complete-national-film-registry-listing/) |
## Spoilers
### Plot
One morning in Oklahoma Territory, before statehood, Curly ([Gordon MacRae](https://www.edgepedia.org/gordon-macrae)) rides over to the farm owned by Aunt Eller (Charlotte Greenwood), where her niece Laurey ([Shirley Jones](https://www.edgepedia.org/shirley-jones)) is getting ready for a box social that evening, at which the young men bid on hampers of food the girls have prepared. Curly and Laurey banter, flirt, and fence: he assumes she will ride to the dance with him, she insists she will go with someone else, and neither will bend. To needle her, Curly spins a fantasy about taking her to the dance in a fancy surrey with fringe on top, driven by a rig so fast it practically flies. Laurey pretends not to be impressed. She is.
A second courtship runs alongside. Ado Annie Carnes ([Gloria Grahame](https://www.edgepedia.org/gloria-grahame)), Laurey's friend, cannot bring herself to turn a man down. She has promised herself to Will Parker (Gene Nelson), a cowboy just back from Kansas City, where he won fifty dollars in a contest precisely so he can marry her, on the strict condition that he hold onto the money. But Annie has also been enjoying the attentions of Ali Hakim ([Eddie Albert](https://www.edgepedia.org/eddie-albert)), a Persian peddler whose wandering hands and wandering goods have gotten him entangled with her father, who insists the peddler either marry Annie or face the consequences. Hakim, aghast, spends the rest of the film trying to wiggle out of the trap his own charm built.
The third suitor waits in the dark. Jud Fry ([Rod Steiger](https://www.edgepedia.org/rod-steiger)) is the hired man who tends the smoke house, a sullen loner with pictures of girls cut from magazines pasted on his wall and a grudge against the world. He has asked Laurey to the box social, and to her own surprise she accepts, partly to punish Curly. Before she gives him her answer, she visits his smoke house, where Jud broods alone in the dim light and muses on how a spark could set the dry wheat around the farm ablaze; the stage song "Lonely Room" was cut from the film. Curly arrives to talk him out of pursuing Laurey, and the two men trade veiled threats in the dim room, Curly even suggesting, half as a joke, that a rope might solve Jud's problems. Laurey, unnerved, keeps her word and rides to the box social with Jud anyway.
**The centerpiece is Laurey's dream, staged as a fourteen-minute ballet that closes the first half of the film.** Having sniffed the perfume the peddler sold her, an "Elixir of Egypt," Laurey drifts into a vision of her own wedding day. Professional dancers stand in for her and Curly as the dream turns from celebration to nightmare: the wedding she imagined with Curly curdles into a marriage to Jud, and she finds herself trapped in a saloon full of menacing dancehall women, unable to escape. Jud menaces her, Curly appears to save her, and in the dream Jud is unharmed: he shoots and strangles Curly while Laurey watches, helpless, before a tornado touches down and the vision breaks apart. [Agnes de Mille](https://www.edgepedia.org/agnes-de-mille)'s choreography plays it out against blazing orange skies and floating frames of buildings, a church, a stairway to nowhere, the outline of a doorway, so that Laurey's private dread becomes a picture on the screen. She wakes, hears Aunt Eller's rough wisdom that life means taking the good with the bad, and realizes with horror that she is now committed to riding to the box social with Jud, having already told him yes.
At the social, the auction turns into a war. Curly, determined to win Laurey's hamper, sells his saddle and his gun to raise cash, and he and Jud bid the hamper up to ruinous sums until Curly wins it at a price that strips him of everything he owns. That night, after the dance, Laurey tells Jud plainly that she does not love him and never will. Jud, drunk and dangerous, refuses to accept it, and Laurey, frightened, dismisses him from her life. He lingers, and the threat he carries now hangs over everything.
The wedding of Curly and Laurey follows, a community celebration with dancing and a fringed surrey waiting for the honeymoon. Jud crashes it, setting fire to the wedding haystack, and attacks Curly with a knife. In the struggle Curly falls on top of him, and Jud is killed when he falls on his own knife, a death staged for the film so that Curly's innocence is cleaner than in the stage version, where Jud's own drunkenness did the work. The wedding guests hold an impromptu trial on the spot, with Andrew Carnes and the local judge presiding, and find Curly not guilty by reason of self-defense. Aunt Eller rouses the crowd to get on with the celebration, and Curly and Laurey ride off in the surrey as the whole cast sings "Oklahoma," the anthem that would one day become the actual state song.[14](https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.053.html)
### Characters
Curly (Gordon MacRae) is the rangy, self-assured cowboy whose easy confidence carries the film's biggest numbers, and whose pride nearly costs him Laurey before his generosity at the auction wins her back.
Laurey (Shirley Jones), in her film debut, is the farm girl with a mind of her own, stubborn on the surface and frightened underneath, and the dream ballet is her interior made visible. Jones, a 21-year-old newcomer from Pennsylvania, was widely singled out as the discovery of the film.[15](https://time.com/archive/6826665/cinema-the-new-pictures-oct-24-1955/)
Jud Fry (Rod Steiger) is the hired hand and the film's darkness, played as a genuine menace rather than a stock villain, mumbling and coiled and lit from below in his smoke house scenes.
Ado Annie (Gloria Grahame) is the comic engine, the girl who cain't say no, caught between Will Parker and Ali Hakim and enjoying every minute of her own dilemma.
Will Parker (Gene Nelson) is the light-footed cowboy fresh from Kansas City with fifty dollars and a proposal, dim-witted and delightful.[16](https://in70mm.com/presents/1955_todd_ao/1955_oklahoma/review/nyt/index.htm)
Ali Hakim (Eddie Albert) is the Persian peddler whose traveling sales and wandering charm keep landing him in engagements he never intended.
Aunt Eller (Charlotte Greenwood) is the matriarch of the farm, rangy and wise, who delivers the film's philosophy: take the good with the bad.
### Interpretations and controversies
The ending has been argued over for seventy years. Jud dies, the guests hold a two-minute trial, Curly is acquitted, and everyone sings the title song. On screen, with Zinnemann's matter-of-fact handling, the sequence plays both as a frontier in-joke and as something genuinely unnerving: a community instantly closing ranks around its golden boy while the man who wanted to belong gets a knife in him and a fast burial in the plot. The film changes the death from the stage version so that Curly lands on Jud and Jud falls on his own knife, making the self-defense verdict easier to swallow.[17](https://seeingthingssecondhand.com/2024/09/30/oklahoma-1955/) Later critics, and the acclaimed 2019 Broadway revival, have leaned hard into the reading that the cheerful final chorus is covering up something ugly, and Steiger's performance makes that reading impossible to un-see.
### Sequels, prequels, and universe
None. Oklahoma! stands alone, though it founded the [Rodgers and Hammerstein](https://www.edgepedia.org/rodgers-and-hammerstein) screen dynasty that followed with Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and [The Sound of Music](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-sound-of-music).
## Production
[Richard Rodgers](https://www.edgepedia.org/richard-rodgers) and [Oscar Hammerstein II](https://www.edgepedia.org/oscar-hammerstein-ii) had been flooded with offers for the film rights while the stage show ran, but they waited until the Broadway run closed before making a deal. What sold them on filming was the new 65mm widescreen process called Todd-AO, developed by producer Michael Todd with the American Optical Company, which could show the wide-open landscapes the stage could only suggest. They kept control by serving as executive producers, and they turned down the major Hollywood studios to work with the start-up Magna Theatre Corporation.[7](https://www.tcm.com/articles/18550/oklahoma-1955) • [9](https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/oklahoma2.pdf)
Zinnemann, known for dramas such as *From Here to Eternity*, had never directed a musical before and never directed another afterward. Because few theaters could show Todd-AO, the film was shot twice: every scene was filmed once in Todd-AO, using 70mm film at 30 frames per second, and once in 35mm [CinemaScope](https://www.edgepedia.org/cinemascope), with some scenes captured by both cameras simultaneously and others re-staged for the second camera. The two versions have different takes and slightly different aspect ratios, 2.21:1 for Todd-AO and 2.35:1 for CinemaScope.[4](https://playbill.com/article/from-rehearsal-to-production-celebrate-65-years-of-oklahoma-on-screen) • [3](https://www.oscars.org/events/oklahoma) • [10](https://in70mm.com/presents/1955_todd_ao/1955_oklahoma/credit/index.htm)
**Location shooting.** Exteriors were filmed near [Nogales, Arizona](https://www.edgepedia.org/nogales-arizona), because the real Oklahoma had too many oil wells to pass for the turn-of-the-century setting. Planting 2,100 stalks of corn for the "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" sequence began almost a year before shooting; by late July 1954 the corn stood 16 feet tall. The location shoot, one of the largest to that date, used about 70 trucks and trailers and a crew of 325 people, contending with daily thunderstorms, a crew member struck by lightning, and a peach orchard that required 2,000 wax peaches hung on the trees each day.[7](https://www.tcm.com/articles/18550/oklahoma-1955)
**Casting.** Zinnemann and the songwriters agreed that strong singing voices were essential for the leads. [James Dean](https://www.edgepedia.org/james-dean) auditioned for Curly and, according to Zinnemann, made a sensational test in the "Poor Jud Is Dead" number, but his singing voice was not strong enough; Gordon MacRae, already a film and stage star with a baritone voice, took the role. Shirley Jones, 19 when she auditioned for *South Pacific* in 1953, was the only performer Rodgers and Hammerstein ever put under exclusive contract, and this was her film debut. Rod Steiger played Jud Fry as a disturbed, emotionally isolated figure rather than a stock villain, and did his own singing. Gloria Grahame, an Oscar-winning actress who was not a singer, played Ado Annie.[7](https://www.tcm.com/articles/18550/oklahoma-1955) • [3](https://www.oscars.org/events/oklahoma)
## Release and reception
The film opened with a roadshow release, limited theatrical-style exhibition with advance-sale reserved-seat ticketing and two screenings a day, a model many 1960s movie musicals adopted. For the New York premiere the Rivoli Theatre underwent a $350,000 renovation, including a new projection booth for the massive Todd-AO projector and a $12,000 screen curtain decorated with Oklahoman motifs, and the film ran there for 51 weeks. Magna Theatre Corporation handled the Todd-AO roadshow release to major American cities, while the wider national release of the CinemaScope version was outsourced to [RKO Pictures](https://www.edgepedia.org/rko-pictures), one of that studio's final releases before it shut down in early 1957; 20th Century Fox then took over the general release rights.[1](https://rodgersandhammerstein.com/production/oklahoma/1955-motion-picture/) • [9](https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/oklahoma2.pdf)
Critics responded strongly. Bosley Crowther of *The New York Times* wrote that a "full-bodied Oklahoma!" had been brought forth to match "in vitality, eloquence and melody any musical this reviewer has ever seen," and *Variety* praised the undiminished tunes and Agnes de Mille's choreography. The film holds a Metascore of 74 on Metacritic, with 13 positive reviews and 2 mixed.[11](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/oklahoma%21/critic-reviews/) Despite the expense and reviews, the box office was only a modest success; by the mid-1950s musicals had lost popularity and television had cut into movie audiences, and some critics felt the film looked stagebound.[7](https://www.tcm.com/articles/18550/oklahoma-1955)
## Music and soundtrack
The cast, led by Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, and Rod Steiger, recorded their tracks before shooting began, as was the custom. The Capitol Records soundtrack album spent 400 weeks on the album charts, including a month at number one, and was later certified two-times multi-platinum. Nelson Riddle released a cover album of the songs the same year.[1](https://rodgersandhammerstein.com/production/oklahoma/1955-motion-picture/) The film score won the Academy Award for Robert Russell Bennett, Jay Blackton, and Adolph Deutsch, and Fred Hynes won for sound recording; Robert Surtees's cinematography and the editing by Gene Ruggiero and George Boemler were nominated.[1](https://rodgersandhammerstein.com/production/oklahoma/1955-motion-picture/)
## Legacy
In 2007 the Library of Congress selected the film for the National Film Registry, citing among its qualities the "breathtaking Technicolor vistas" of its pre-statehood story.[8](https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-film-preservation-board/film-registry/complete-national-film-registry-listing/) • [12](https://www.okgazette.com/news/library-of-congress-gifts-oklahoma-to-national-film-registry-2950021/) The Todd-AO version, the lesser-seen of the two, was restored by 20th Century Fox and screened for the first time in 2014 at the Fifth Annual TCM Classic Film Festival.[4](https://playbill.com/article/from-rehearsal-to-production-celebrate-65-years-of-oklahoma-on-screen) The film's roadshow rollout set the pattern for large-scale movie musicals of the following decade, and Todd-AO itself became the standard for 65mm and 70mm production, inspiring the format for the next 50 years.[1](https://rodgersandhammerstein.com/production/oklahoma/1955-motion-picture/) • [10](https://in70mm.com/presents/1955_todd_ao/1955_oklahoma/credit/index.htm)
## References
1. [Oklahoma! – 1955 Motion Picture, Rodgers & Hammerstein](https://rodgersandhammerstein.com/production/oklahoma/1955-motion-picture/)
2. [Oklahoma! (1955), AFI Catalog](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/51607-OKLAHOMA?cp=1&pos=0&sid=8a5cce24-d634-4d1f-816b-6b2e141fdb7e&sr=13.706038)
3. [Oklahoma!, Oscars.org event page](https://www.oscars.org/events/oklahoma)
4. [From Rehearsal to Production: Celebrate 65 Years of Oklahoma! on Screen, Playbill](https://playbill.com/article/from-rehearsal-to-production-celebrate-65-years-of-oklahoma-on-screen)
5. [Oklahoma!, NNDB](https://www.nndb.com/films/627/000040507/)
6. [Watch Oklahoma!, Turner Classic Movies](https://www.tcm.com/watchtcm/titles/85454)
7. [Oklahoma! (1955), TCM article by Margarita Landazuri](https://www.tcm.com/articles/18550/oklahoma-1955)
8. [Complete National Film Registry Listing, Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-film-preservation-board/film-registry/complete-national-film-registry-listing/)
9. [Film essay for "Oklahoma!" by Phil Hall, National Film Preservation Board](https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/oklahoma2.pdf)
10. ["Oklahoma!" Cast & Credits, in70mm.com](https://in70mm.com/presents/1955_todd_ao/1955_oklahoma/credit/index.htm)
11. [Oklahoma! Critic Reviews, Metacritic](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/oklahoma%21/critic-reviews/)
12. [Library of Congress gifts 'Oklahoma!' to National Film Registry, Oklahoma Gazette](https://www.okgazette.com/news/library-of-congress-gifts-oklahoma-to-national-film-registry-2950021/)
13. [Lawrence VOT V14 3 WEB.pdf, alexfilmsociety.org](https://www.alexfilmsociety.org/newsletters/Lawrence_VOT_V14_3_WEB.pdf)
14. [https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.053.html](https://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.fil.053.html)
15. [https://time.com/archive/6826665/cinema-the-new-pictures-oct-24-1955/](https://time.com/archive/6826665/cinema-the-new-pictures-oct-24-1955/)
16. [https://in70mm.com/presents/1955_todd_ao/1955_oklahoma/review/nyt/index.htm](https://in70mm.com/presents/1955_todd_ao/1955_oklahoma/review/nyt/index.htm)
17. [https://seeingthingssecondhand.com/2024/09/30/oklahoma-1955/](https://seeingthingssecondhand.com/2024/09/30/oklahoma-1955/)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Musical and music films (individual works) › Musical films of the 1930s to 1960s*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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