The Unexpected Politics of 'Seven Brides for Seven Brothers'

It takes a musical to settle the score on democratic greatness

In The Virginian, the inaugural novel of the Western genre, Owen Wister praises the meritocracy and even the aristocracy of the wild west.

“[We] decreed,” Wister writes, “that every man should thenceforth have equal liberty to find his own level. By this very decree we acknowledged and gave freedom to true aristocracy, saying, ‘Let the best man win, whoever he is.’ Let the best man win! That is America's word. That is true democracy. And true democracy and true aristocracy are one and the same thing.” 

With these words, Wister introduces one of the greatest themes (and problems) examined in the Western: the great individual who towers above the rest. I’m speaking, for example, of the image of greatness that The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance presents in Jimmy Stewart’s Ranse Stoddard (as well as the reality of that greatness as found in John Wayne’s Tom Doniphon), or even Wayne’s other portrayal of the capable, perhaps all-too-capable Ethan Edwards in The Searchers.

Greatness is no simple thing, as each of these characters proves. Sometimes these “giants” aren’t simply good (even if they are masters of the effectual), but no matter what, there’s something to be admired in them, something greater than life. And if, as my good friend Tyler MacQueen argues, The Searchers is the Great American Movie, then it is so at least in part because it explores Wister’s seemingly contradictory claims about equality and greatness in the American experience.

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One thing that few Westerns explore, however, is how this very American question relates to previous models of greatness. Is John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards different or the same as the Greek Achilles, who dragged Hector’s corpse before the walls of Troy, or the Roman Brutus, who plotted against his friend to save the Republic he held so dear? 

Perhaps it would take a very different sort of movie to examine this question—indeed, it might take a musical to settle the score.

Let me explain.  

My wife recently introduced me to Stanley Donen’s wonderful Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. In the musical, Adam Pontipee (played by Howard Keel) arrives in a small Oregon-territory town with a clear mission: to find a wife who can cook. He meets Milly (played by Jane Powell), who agrees to marry him and move to his backwoods cabin up in the mountains. But Milly soon learns there’s a catch: Adam and his six brothers all live in the same cabin, and they expect Milly to do all of the chores.

Milly, being the industrious and clever woman she is, decides that the fastest way to get out of her predicament is to teach these mountain men how to court a lady and then marry them all off to her friends. The Pontipee brothers, after all, are stronger, smarter, and more handsome than their townsfolk competition—they are the spitting image of rugged Western greatness, the natural aristoi of America. 

But things go awry—though I won’t spoil how. When their marriages don’t materialize, these once great men are reduced to a miserable group of schoolboys swinging axes in the snow in this beautifully choreographed scene:

Not one to abide his brothers’ misery, Adam steps in with a suggestion (and, I have to note, with my wife’s favorite song of the whole movie). He’s been reading one of Milly’s books lately—Plutarch’s Parallel Lives—and he has an idea: why don’t they go and kidnap the women, just like Romulus the founder of Rome kidnapped the Sabine women (something that he humorously mispronounces as “the sobbin’ women”)?

Adam doesn’t want his brothers just to be great men; he also wants them to emulate the great men of ages past. Adam’s rustic presumption is that the greatness of yesterday is the same as the greatness of today—meaning that the great individual of America is no different than the great individual of ancient Greece, Rome, or Byzantium.

The kidnapping is successful, but the scheme fails. Adam and the boys return to find that their new guests really are “sobbing women” and are by no means “overjoyed,” contrary to their earlier musical number. What’s more, Milly lays into them all, but most especially Adam:

“You’re gonna’ eat and sleep in the barn with the rest of the livestock. Now get out of here. I’m ashamed of ya’… you too [Adam]… do you think those girls would marry them now? … You think a wife is just a cook and clean. You got no understandings you’ve got no feelings. How could you do a thing like this! When I think of these poor girls sick with fright and their families crazy with worry, I can’t abide to look at you!”

While Milly confronts Adam for his selfish actions, a blurred portrait hangs on the wall behind her right shoulder:

Ultimately, she storms off and leaves Adam stunned on the porch. Adam, unable to sympathize with Milly or the kidnapped girls, considers himself the injured party and flees to a hunting cabin farther up the mountain, where he waits out the winter.

When spring arrives and Adam returns, he finds that Milly has had a child—his child, a baby girl (or, as my wife would say, “perhaps his child!”; but I leave that for another review). He enters the cabin to talk with Milly and, as he kneels by the crib, the portrait that was previously over Milly’s shoulder during their fight is now clearly shown in the background. Behind Adam, clear as day, hangs a rudimentary portrait of a Lincoln-like figure, somewhere between the chromolithograph in the U.S. Treasury Collection and Willem Frederik Karel Travers’s portrait of the president.

While the Lincoln-like figure is blurred at Adam’s lowest moment—the very moment he most embodies the heroes of ages past—the image becomes clear at Adam’s redemption, when he comes to accept that he’s wronged Milly, the families in the town, and the kidnapped women.

The changes in the visibility of the portrait mirror the development of Adam as not just a great individual, but most especially a democratic one. For example, Adam explains that he changed his mind on the Roman-style kidnapping because he, after reflecting on his own family, finally recognized the humanity of his fellow citizens. He shares this particularly democratic realization with Milly while standing over their child:

“Thinking about the baby… [and] about how I’d feel if someone came sneaking in and carried her off. I’d string him up the nearest tree ‘n shoot him down like I would a thievin’ fox.”

These words betray a universal perspective far more befitting the great emancipator Abraham Lincoln than the narrowly proud or civically minded actions of an Achilles, a Romulus, or a Caesar. The affectionate bonds of family let Adam step outside of himself and allow him to recognize the key republican insight: “all men are created equal.”

This kind of realization would have been—and indeed was—foreign to those Greek or Roman men. The “papa” of the wild west is in no way the pater familias of Rome. The softening of Adam’s heart at the birth of his child therefore reminds us of a peculiar truth about democracies. As Alexis de Tocqueville says in his famous Democracy in America, 

“In America, the family, taking this word in its Roman and aristocratic sense, does not exist… one sees what there used to be of the austere, the conventional, and the legal in paternal power disappearing, and a sort of equality being established … It is therefore not by interests but by community of memories and free sympathy of opinions and tastes that democracy attaches brothers to one another. It divides their inheritance, but it permits their souls to intermingle. The sweetness of these democratic mores is so great that even partisans of aristocracy allow themselves to be taken by it, and after tasting it for some time, they are not tempted to return.”

And while this musical emphasizes the loving and intimate nature of the democratic family, it also (in true Tocquevillian fashion) highlights the greatness of the democratic woman. It is Milly who shows the brothers the importance of love, Milly who teaches Adam how to sympathize with another, Milly who cooks and cleans and helps Adam with the chores, and Milly who comforts the kidnapped brides. And, what’s more, the only classically educated character in the whole movie is Milly.

In fact, the very quality that draws Adam to Milly is her greatness. When he first sees her, she is chopping wood behind the inn that she works at. After Milly goes indoors, Adam peers through a window and sees a suitor propose to Milly—a suitor that she immediately grabs and throws to the ground without a second thought. Adam then joyfully sings: “simple and sweet—and sassy as can be! Bless her beautiful hide, yes! she’s the girl for me!” 

The grand insight, then, of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is that even the great individuals of the American west are still democratic individuals to their core—and, what’s more, that greatness is expressed in a particularly egalitarian way: Milly’s greatness doesn’t just benefit Adam, it helps him to find his own greatness, too.

When it comes to Westerns, we’re found of noting how great men leave society on an adventure into the great unknown. The Western, in presenting an environment analogous to the state of nature, helps us to consider the relationship between heroism and law.

But in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, we see how the cowboy and the mountaineer are still democratic heroes. We see that even when we travel deep into the howling wilderness, we still carry democracy with us in our bones.