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Rose-Marie is an operetta by Rudolf Friml, Otto Harbach, and Oscar Hammerstein II, first seen on Broadway in 1924. The show was filmed three times, the first time in the silent era. Joan Crawford starred in the 1928 version, and later remarked, "Rose Marie was surprisingly good without the music, but I felt uneasy as a French Canadian, but the critics didn't notice." The best known version was that of 1936, which starred Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. However, the original plot and most of the songs were dropped in this version. None the less, it was a huge success and became MacDonald and Eddy's best-known film. In 1954, MGM produced a Technicolor version in Cinemascope, which (more or less) followed the original plot, but still dropped most of Friml's songs, compounding the travesty by adding a couple of inferior substitutes. This version starred Ann Blyth, Howard Keel and Fernando Lamas, with Bert Lahr and Marjorie Main as comic relief. Probably the most famous song in the musical is the Indian Love Call. It became Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy's "signature" song. |