Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Why so much hype?

That was an excellent one.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

I saw this as a teen many years after it came out. The songs were beautiful, performances great. The pain and loss he felt was very moving. And I absolutely fell in love with Shirley Jones. Just a great movie. Not the typical every thing will work out perfect movie.

Copyright 1956 by 20th Century-Fox Film Corp. New York opening at the Roxy: 16 February 1956. U.S. release: February 1956. U.K. release: 21 May 1956. Australian release: 4 June 1956. Sydney opening at the Regent. 11,561 feet. 128 minutes.SYNOPSIS: The daughter of a carousel barker is ostracized by other children in a New England town at the turn of the century. NOTES: Second to "The King and I" as Fox's top-grossing domestic release of 1955-56. Fox's top box-office money-maker in Australia in 1956. Originally it was planned to shoot Fox's 49th CinemaScope movie in both 55mm CinemaScope and standard 35mm CinemaScope. Frank Sinatra, who had been signed for the part of Billy Bigelow (over the strenuous objections of Rodgers and Hammerstein), balked at making a print of every scene twice ("Everyone knows I've only got one good take in me!") and walked out. After MacRae had been signed, it was decided to shoot each scene on 55mm stock only and optically reduce to 35mm in the laboratory. The studio had intended to make 55mm projection prints available for roadshow engagements, but no cinema was prepared to pay the expense of re-equipping. So the movie was shown in 35mm CinemaScope everywhere. COMMENT: The lovely Shirley Jones is absolutely perfect as the vulnerable Julie, while critics with considerable justification predicted a big future for Barbara Ruick. (In fact she had no future in movies at all. This was her fifth and last film). Robert Rounseville, who had made his picture debut in Tales of Hoffmann (1951) was also deservedly praised, but he made no more pictures either. This was the only movie Claramae Turner ever made, but audiences were lucky enough to glimpse the entrancing Susan Luckey again in The Music Man (1962). The superlative dancing of Jacques D'Amboise was first seen in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. After this spectacular follow-up, Producer Henry Ephron signed him for The Best Things In Life Are Free, a somewhat disillusioning experience which soured D'Amboise from Hollywood forever — except for the 1967 A Midsummer Night's Dream.Yes, everyone else is so great — Audrey Christie as the jealous Mrs. Mullin whose relationship with Billy is so cleverly conveyed by her gestures as well as her reactive words; Gene Lockhart in one of his last roles as the philosophical doctor/starkeeper; Cameron Mitchell, judiciously cast for once as the truly repulsive Jigger; John Dehner as a patronizing local moneybags; Richard Deacon as an obsequious policeman — it's a shame MacRae is so lackluster. Mind you, as said, King's sluggish, very loosely-framed direction does little to assist. Nor does Ephron's unnecessarily verbose script.Despite its shortcomings, "Carousel" is still a wonderfully uplifting musical experience. Rodgers' music is at its most haunting, most tuneful, most electric. Hammerstein's lyrics are perhaps at times a little too smart-alecky. The most impressively unforgettable numbers are the two dance set-pieces: "June Is Bustin' Out All Over" and "Louise's Ballet". Really zestful choreography, really expressive dancing make these numbers truly outstanding cinema pleasures.

Carousel is your typical Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. It is brimming with lilting, hummable familiar tunes. The orchestral music lifts you up and floats you along on a wave of champagne bubbles. The plot is corny as an opera. I wish Hollywood was still making musicals I can remember every scene of every musical I have ever seen. The anti-feminist attitudes are shocking to a modern audience. It even offers a strange defence of wife-beating.Agnes de Mille did the choreography. It was gymnastic, athletic and quite difficult. However, most of it was trite and corny even for a musical. Further, it borrowed a lot from ballet. The fisherman looked ridiculous flitting about with effete moves from the era of Louis XVI. This movie would have knocked it out of the park had Bob Fosse been old enough to choreograph it.The themes are the oft-repeated song "You will never walk alone", and people are so cruel to those they think are not upholding norms of propriety.This is a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical made roughly at the same time as Oklahoma, the Sound of Music and the King and I, but is not of the same quality. But even with its flaws, it is still a wonderful treat.

I had no expectations at all and knew nothing about it when I was given a chance to see this in my country the least known of Rodgers-Hammerstein musicals. The first thing you are met with is some metaphysics, and then the show starts and goes on throughout in splendour and marvellous choreography throughout in a very rustic environment of fishermen and very ordinary people, who by the music are raised to a lyrical level of some prominence. It's a wonderland of beauty very originally mixed up with great human passion and drama including an upsetting tragedy with reverberating shock effects. The story is curiously exotic and strange for an American musical, but then the original story is actually Hungarian taking place in Budapest and is a bleak tragedy indeed, which even Giacomo Puccini asked permission of the author to make an opera of, which he would not risk it getting debased by. Rodgers & Hammerstein succeeded in transforming it for the stage and make it work with wonder, changing the end, of course. The actors, none of them very known today, are all outstanding, and no objections against the story and its morals or lack of morals are justified. This is a fairy tale brought down to reality with its metaphysics and fairy tale wonders made real in the cinema and enhanced by the overwhelming excellence of the music. You can see it as a morality, of course, but then it is a very edifying one, turning the bleak tragedy of failed human efforts at some worldly success and love into a triumph of the actual good will. This is not only a film to wonder at and enjoy but to do so more than once and again.