The House Next Door

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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It’s easy to criticize this Western musical comedy retelling of the Rape of the Sabine Women as an unapologetically sexist defense of American Manifest Destiny principles set to song and dance. More interesting is the class logic behind the narrative that drives a band of backwoods brothers to abduct women from a neighboring town to become their spouses. The men, having been trained by their sister-in-law in the ways of civility, first attempt to court these women through the societal ritual of a barnraising. The underhanded trickery of rival courters from the town provoke them to violent outrage. The guileful townsmen represent civilization as corrupt; the resulting abduction of the women amounts a righteous revolt against class abuse. In the end, the two sides are hardly reconciled; the frontier (i.e. the brothers) takes only as much from civilization as it needs (in the form of these women) to perpetuate itself. The abrupt, somewhat unsatisfying resolution of a shotgun mass wedding caused by the perception of widespread fornication is the film’s final raspberry at the laws governing civility.
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