The dream sequence is one of the most beautiful, surreal nightmares on film. The tornado, the hallways, the dancing, the movement, the lighting, the music, the sound design, it's a vision of western plains thunderviolence with emotional drama, painted onto the walls of the horizon. It's a masterpiece in and of itself, positioned amidst bright, deep shots of Arizona pretending to be Oklahoma. The whole film is a painting of wide ranges and fields, dirt roads and railroads, costumes and old houses.

Westerns are so heavily coded in the Hollywood mythos as masculine films; this film manages to weave those cowboy trappings into magnificent dance sequences and colorful happiness. Tap dancing and strutting mix together as characterization. The contrast between…

The rest of the story that surrounds this film's extraordinarily emblematic dream sequence is exactly what I would expect it to be from a musical in the mid 1950s (although a tad hornier if I'm being honest...), but it's that dream sequence - and, of course, that larger than life final song - that makes it a classic in the Musical Canon.

As Sally Jane Black describes that sequence within her eloquent review, "The tornado, the hallways, the dancing, the movement, the lighting, the music, the sound design, it's a vision of western plains thunderviolence with emotional drama, painted onto the walls of the horizon." It's a completely different canvas the film is working on than the rest of the…