Mamoulian’s final film for Paramount is an unusual epic musical boasting an imaginative story and cast lead by Irene Dunne as a spirited carnival signer and Randolph Scott as a visionary entrepreneur who find love in the wild storm of the pre-Civil War Pennsylvania oil rush. Clearly meant as a follow-up to the box office smash Showboat from the year before, High, Wide and Handsome’s eccentrically spirited Americana predicted Mamoulian’s successful direction of Oklahoma! on Broadway. Gifted with lesser known yet gorgeous Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein ballads—beautifully sung by Dunne and a devastating Dorothy Lamour—High, Wide and Handsome floats delicately between dreamy soundstage fantasy and a sweeping vision of American history set against stunning frontier landscapes. The film’s constant jumps between sawdust-and-tinsel artifice and a rousing narrative of brave Common Man pitted against the craven Capital Barons climaxes in an extraordinary melding of the two that makes clear Mamoulian’s vision of the cinema as a vehicle for both enlightenment and entertainment, or, as Richard Roud once called the film, a “fusion of Brecht and Broadway.”