The second of the three musicals by Douglas Sirk ,sandwiched between " has anybody seen my girl?" and " take me to town "; this one resumes the subject of his last European movie "Boefje" for it focuses on the fate of a young boy ;in the 1939 movie, the boy (played by a woman at 45!) had a family ,but poverty led him to theft till a minister takes him under his wing.
Doc and Enoch do the same for Tad in the 1953 effort,but the treatment is lighter ,tongue -in-cheek , and enlivened by infectious songs , from the cowboy trad "Oh Susannah " to Gounod's "Ave Maria " to the title track and the irresistible "I was there" .
Dan Dailey ,Scatman Crothers et Chet Allen make an endearing threesome ; Doc has the gift of the gab and the blarney he uses to sell his potion supposed to prolong your life makes his stuff sell like hot cakes. In the prim well-to-do society ,they are outcasts , and the boy , escaped from a Detention Home , considers them his foster fathers;Doc has this sublime line : "how can one couple "detention" and "home"?".Chilton Corr (Hugh O' Brian ,cast against type)represents the establishment and he goes as far as to fool his fiancée (Diana Lynn) to "capture" the boy and to assure the elections.
But even that is not really treated in a spectacular way , and doc's counterattack is immediate and unexpected .
Compared to Sirk's masterful melodramas ,it's a minor work , but in those works,the characters are prisoners of social conventions, "(grown-up) children act as moral status-preserver forces which keep the adults in the cages which society has prepared for them" (Sirk himself talking about "all that heaven allows" and " there's always tomorrow")
In "meet me at the fair " ,on the contrary ,there's freedom in the air ; not only Doc and Enoch do not play the society's game, but the former also opens a make believe world ,in which he single-handedly fights the Indians and helps preserve the Victorian British empire : par excellence the surrogate father any child dreams of.
