YMMV / Carousel

• Adaptation Displacement: After Carousel, Liliom's now a footnote.
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Given that the portrayal of his minor role depends on the production, Enoch Snow Jr. invites a lot of this. Is he an Entitled Bastard whose marriage proposal to Louise was Condescending Compassion to save her from a life of sin? A well-meaning guy trying to invoke Childhood Friend Romance? Does he agree with his father that Louise is "beneath his station" or simply saying what his father would think and phrased it poorly? Depending if he's in the montage of Louise's Ballet as in the movie, is he a guy who genuinely likes Louise but has a bad case of Bystander Syndrome when it comes to standing up for her? Does his outburst against Louise show his true colors as a Rich Jerk or is it just something said in a fit of temper that he regretted later?
  • Likewise how does Louise see him? A Childhood Friend who she can confide in? A nuisance she barely puts up with? Does she have feelings for him or not?
• Fair for Its Day: The topic of domestic abuse was not handled very well in this play, but in 1945 the fact that it even admitted this happened was a small breakthrough.
• Padding: "June Is Bustin' Out All Over" seems to eat up too much of the movie, since it has a five-minute dance sequence performed either mostly or entirely by nameless extras.
• Special Effect Failure: The scenes of the movie shot indoors look more artificial than those shot on location.
• Tear Jerker:
  • "You'll Never Walk Alone"
  • The instrumental "Louise's Ballet". It turns into a bit of Nightmare Fuel at the end when after she is left by a circus boy she had a crush on, a group of kids circle her and chant "shame on you!" until Louise runs away crying.
• Values Dissonance: A general theme of the story is supposed to be "Love your man, despite his faults." But it comes off as "If your deadbeat husband beats you and has no respect for you, it just means he loves you." The fact that the song telling this moral was later made by Amanda Palmer into a chilling remix describing battered wife syndrome without changing a single thing about the song really says something. Newer productions tend to aim for Deliberate Values Dissonance in that same vein by showing Julie's love for him as more unambiguously tragic and self-destructive or highlighting the cycle of subpar parenting that produced Billy and would have been passed on to his child; some productions go as far as to make it ambiguous whether the one good deed Billy performs at the end is enough to save him from damnation.
• The Woobie:
  • Julie. Just Julie, period.
  • Also Louise, her daughter. Due to her father's reputation, she has almost no friends since the local kids ostracize her. Poor thing...

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