I Can Watch the Same Movie Over and Over

The power of the film is grounded in the creativity of two stodgy men in suits, who looked like bankers: Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein III. Rodgers was a prolific composer of jazz standards and of entire shows, mainly with Lorenz Hart. Hammerstein was a producer, director, man about town, with a rare gift for writing song lyrics that were warm, witty and sentimental, without being too corny. His main collaborator was Jerome Kern. Rodgers was a hard unsentimental man (his daughter Mary has written a book about what it was like to have RR as a father). Hammerstein was a lovely people person, who discovered Mary Martin when she was a 20 year old fresh out of her native Texas. He also mentored the young Stephen Sondheim. Hart and Kern both died in the early 1940s, whereupon Rodgers and Hammerstein contacted each other and went to work; Oklahoma! was the result. They then wrote a hit musical a year, with the most remarkable one being South Pacific. This streak ended in 1951, with The King and I. Then nothing until The Sound of Music, which opened in 1959. Hammerstein died in 1960. Rodgers lived another 19 years, and wrote 2-3 middling shows, but his voice was never the same.