Film

High, Wide and Handsome

Name: High, Wide and Handsome
Genre: Music, Western
Released: 1937
Cast: Irene Dunne, Randolph Scott, Dorothy Lamour, Elizabeth Patterson, Raymond Walburn

Romance

A 1937 musical Western about an oil-pipeline dreamer and a medicine-show performer who fall in love in 1870s Pennsylvania. It's a lavish, earnest affair with songs that stop the action, remarkable Technicolor, and genuine warmth beneath the period artifice. For anyone charmed by old Hollywood's willingness to burst into song or fascinated by early American enterprise gone romantic.

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Showboat

Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote the songs here too, and it has the same sweep and production ambition. Irene Dunne carries both films with grace. A musical about American life at a grander scale.

But The pacing is glacial by modern standards, and racial attitudes of the era are embedded in the story itself. Some will find it difficult.

Follow the Fleet1936

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing to Irving Berlin in a naval setting. Pure joy, pure craft. The same era's commitment to building entire sequences around a song, done with incomparable skill.

But It's a romantic comedy first and the plot is genuinely thin. If you need narrative momentum, you'll feel the film coasting.

The Big Trees1952

Kirk Douglas as a ruthless businessman in 1850s California, meeting conscience and love in the wilderness. A later Western musical hybrid with similar DNA—ambition, landscape, romance, moral reckoning—but tougher.

But It's less polished and more uneven than High, Wide and Handsome. The tonal shifts can feel jarring rather than charming.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller1971

Both are Westerns about American enterprise and romance built on the frontier dream, but one believes in it and the other doesn't. They're the same story told with opposite conclusions.

Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in the anti-High, Wide and Handsome: a Western where enterprise and dreams are mired in mud, greed and death. Leonard Cohen sings over a vision of the frontier as brutal, not romantic. A masterpiece about the same American mythology, completely inverted.

But It's bleak, cynical, and visually murky. If you want the transcendence and beauty of the 1937 film, this will feel like a betrayal.

Oklahoma!1955

Rodgers and Hammerstein again, but even more lavish. A musical Western about settlement and dreams, with real scale and real songs that matter to the story. Agnes de Mille choreography that changed everything.

But Nearly two hours and fifty minutes of earnestness. The opening is famous for a reason, but patience is required for the whole thing.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers1954

A musical Western about building a life in the frontier, with extraordinary dancing and genuine charm. Less ambitious than High, Wide and Handsome but more purely entertaining—a perfect film of its kind.

But The gender politics are deeply of their time. Some of the comedy lands oddly now, and the premise itself will strike modern viewers as strange.

Pennies from Heaven1936

Another Irene Dunne vehicle, with Fred Astaire, about ordinary people finding music and romance in depression-era hardship. The same warmth and sincerity, slightly smaller in scope but equally felt.

But The sentimentality is relentless. If you're allergic to earnestness, this will feel cloying despite its quality.

The Great Waltz1938

Luise Rainer as a woman inspired by and inspiring Johann Strauss. Another sprawling musical biography from the same era, with similar production values and romantic architecture.

But It's historically nonsense and dramatically contrived. If accuracy matters to you, the liberties taken will be frustrating.

Maytime1937

Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in an operetta about love and sacrifice across decades. The same year as High, Wide and Handsome, with comparable ambition and similar emotional register.

But It's a tragedy dressed as musical romance, and the plotting is baroque. The emotional manipulation is explicit and some find it exhausting.

Rose of the Rancho1936

John Boles and Gladys Swarthout in a Western musical about California land disputes and love. A smaller film but with the same period charm and similar preoccupations.

But It's genuinely minor. The music is pleasant, the story thin, and it doesn't stick with you the way better examples do.

Merry Go Round of 19381937

Both are optimistic musicals about immigration and building something new in America, but one is grand and earnest, the other cheerful and cheap.

An ice-skating musical with Simone Simon and Stuart Erwin about a European immigrant building a business in America. Same year, same structure—working-class romance and dream-building—but in a completely different register: faster, lighter, almost vaudeville.

But The comedy is dated slapstick and the story is genuinely silly. It's less substantial than High, Wide and Handsome in every way except charm.

My Man Godfrey1936

Both are 1930s American films about worth and enterprise—one earnest and musical, one comic and sharp. They're asking the same questions about who we are, just with different tools.

William Powell and Carole Lombard in a screwball comedy about a con man teaching a wealthy family what matters. It's also about American enterprise and human value, but as comedy—fast, clever, morally knowing without preaching. From the same year, same era, same faith in character and human decency.

But It's a comedy, not a romance or musical. The tone is entirely different, the songs are absent, and the structure is built on jokes rather than spectacle.