No decade made better revisionist westerns than the 1950s, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers stands as one of the essentials, perhaps only a step down from the work of Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann and John Ford. The lie of the frontier, Seven Brides argues, is in the myth that brave and willful men settled the frontier. These men cleared the way for civilization, such as it might be in a place like Oregon, and their doings a century hence are the doings of demigods. Women followed, the myth says. They were heroic in their own ways as well, but only heroic as is ever the lot of women, and the great deeds belong to those like Adam Pontipee.

Howard Keel’s Adam is the crest of his MGM career. He had been gearing up for a role like this one for half a decade at this point. Clean-shaven, as he was in Annie Get Your Gun and Pagan Love Song, he’s a big child. The charm is still a little rough, as if someone this much over six feet is still growing into the paws, trying to turn pawing into caressing. With the facial hair, as he plays Petruchio in Kiss Me Kate and Adam in Seven Brides, we know this is no virgin playing at lovemaking. This one boasts of his romantic prowess. Even from the beginning of Seven Brides, in “Bless Yore Beautiful Hide,” Adam does not worry about whether he can get a wife. He means to choose from the varied women in town the way a dimunitive Republican chooses between pickup trucks, and just as the F-150 can’t say no, neither does he imagine that a lady would say no to him. He’s right. His arrogance prevails, and he rides out from town with a wife who fits the qualifications he asked for: pretty, trim, not too slim, heavenly eyes, just the right size, simple, sweet, “and sassy as can be!”

The frontiersman, whether you look at him with a gaze romantic or steely, is a taker. He is one who grabs, possesses, annexes. Alone among his brothers can Adam Pontipee pass as normal among the townspeople, for the rest of them are more like ferrets than men. In his own home, Adam is a jackal leading the motley group, and where Milly possesses the will and wherewithal to civilize the boys, Adam refuses to learn any lessons from the wife he barely put any effort into keeping. For much of the film, Adam is fundamentally absent from the doings. He sticks around long enough to kidnap six of the girls from town, and then, once he is faced with the slightest reproach for something which is, at least, hilariously criminal, he disappears.

Adam lives without empathy, and if that changes by the end of the film, there are no concrete signs of it. He’s ultimately brought back to the house by news of a daughter, and, to some extent, by the shame that his formerly submissive brothers feel about him. There are few people so disappointing as the “father of a daughter” people, the people who only came to recognize that women had feelings and beliefs once they were somewhat responsible for bringing one into the world. One might damn them simply for lack of imagination regardless of how little empathy they have. Adam is never forced to own up to his savagery in Seven Brides. The most densely populated shotgun weddings in the history of Oregon mean that Adam does not have to face the consequences of his own antisocial behaviors in a legal or social setting. He goes out to a cabin and comes back with the world around him a little different than before. Knowing what we know of the frontiersman taker, it won’t be long until he tries to change his world again.