Finian's Rainbow

It took 20 years for one of post World War II Broadway's biggest hits to finally come to the screen. Finian's Rainbow ran for 725 performances in the 1947-48 season on Broadway and made a star out of David Wayne as Og the Leprechaun. Unfortunately in getting to the screen too late a lot of the satire and meaning of the book was lost on the audience of a different generation.

The book of E.Y. Harburg and Fred Saidy is set firmly in the visionary years of the New Deal with its satire on racism and unregulated capitalism. An immigrant Irishman arrives at Rainbow Valley in the state of Missitucky bearing the pot of gold stolen from a leprechaun. Said leprechaun now played by Tommy Steele is hot on his trail and growing. In fact if he doesn't get it back and soon he's going to become a mortal.

Playing the parts of Finian McLonergan and his daughter Sharon originated on Broadway by Albert Sharpe and Ella Logan are Fred Astaire and Petula Clark. Astaire in his last musical role hasn't lost a single step in his nimble feet though the part does not call for as much dancing as you would expect. In fact the dancing is mostly done by Tommy Steele and Barbara Hancock playing Susan the Silent. That I'm betting is different from the Broadway show where David Wayne, talented actor that he was, was no dancer.

Finian's Rainbow was the first big budget film that young Francis Ford Coppola directed and he seems to have adopted the style Robert Wise used in West Side Story and The Sound Of Music. Especially the latter where the whole screen is filled with the vastness of Rainbow Valley and the players sing and dance in it.

Every paradise does have a Grinch and in this case its Keenan Wynn playing old time southern Senator Billboard Rawkins. Back in the day before nationwide mass media and the southerners cleaned up their act somewhat, some of those guys let loose with some unbridled racism. Chief among them was a guy from Mississippi named Theodore G. Bilbo on whom Wynn's character is based. Audiences in 1968 would not know who Bilbo was so the point of the name is lost on them. But when Billboard Rawkins gets a good taste of how the other half lives, no one could miss that.

Al Freeman's black scientist working on a menthol flavored tobacco could not be mistaken for anyone other than George Washington Carver who died in 1943. But by 1968 with a new generation of civil rights leaders, Freeman's character significance is lost.

In a way though with Barack Obama's election to the presidency this year the vision of Finian's Rainbow might just be more relevant now than ever. And the Burton Lane-E.Y. Harburg songs will never go out of style. Old Devil Moon and How Are Things In Glocca Morra have become mega pop standards.

If you can find it in addition to the original Broadway cast album which was Columbia Record's first in that category and the cast album for the film, I highly recommend the Reprise Musical Theater all star album of the songs of Finian's Rainbow. Frank Sinatra gathered many of his contemporaries like Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr. Clark Dennis, Debbie Reynolds, Rosemary Clooney, Bing Crosby and the McGuire Sisters all do the songs from the score and it's a gem of a record. Hasn't been in print for years so get to those second hand stores.

In the meantime watch and enjoy this film.

The 60s were a strange time for cinema – a flourishing of surreal, psychedelic, political and often pretentious film-making. And yet the figures and ideals of the previous generation – Hollywood's golden age – were still around, and neither had they been totally forgotten by the younger generation. Finian's Rainbow was quite literally a remnant from that bygone era, having been an acclaimed stage musical in the 1940s. Had it not been for its controversial subject matter it would probably have been produced for screen in the 50s. As it was, the eventual film adaptation found itself an old-time song-and-dance show in an era where the musical had become something very different indeed.

In a way Finian's Rainbow was always a mix-and-match musical. The E.Y. Harburg-Burton Lane score blends Broadway brass with Irish jigs and occasionally gospel to surprising success. The story also places old-world folklore alongside contemporary racial issues, in what is a sometimes awkward but generally passable modern-day fairytale. Aside from anything else, the Lane melodies are of considerable beauty and the Harburg lyrics witty enough that it makes a broadly appealing and timeless package. Fans of the inventive wordplay in the numbers from Wizard of Oz, which were also penned by Harburg, will appreciate such clever twists as "Make him a better person… not a worse 'un" Harburg even reuses the word "individdle", here rhyming it with fiddle, having rhymed it with riddle in Oz.

Another relic of the old days appears in the form of Fred Astaire as the titular Finian. Astaire may be lacking his cane and topper, he may be showing the signs of his age a little, and his accent may be about as authentically Irish as a gift-shop Shillelagh – but it's still the same old Fred, full of the effortless dance-steps and easygoing charm that won over audiences thirty-five years earlier. It's a real delight to see him here, partly because his endearing demeanour is so reassuringly familiar, and yet he still makes an honest attempt to deviate from his regular persona to create this crusty yet lovable old Irishman. Representing the new is a fresh-faced Tommy Steele, playing the leprechaun Og. A certain proportion of Steele's performance, say 10%, is pure brilliance. Unfortunately the remaining 90% is pure annoyance, as Steele grins and capers his way maddeningly through some disappointingly flat renditions of the Harburg-Lane numbers. Still, he does appear to have struck some kind of unlikely rapport with Astaire, and their scenes together are among the most brightly comical.

The director was from the young side of the fence. Francis Ford Coppola was a graduate of Roger Corman's schlock factory, and this was his first big-budget assignment. Coppola had already demonstrated himself to be a director who took a detached and distant view of things, often keeping his camera high above the action or peeping from amongst foreground foliage. Oddly enough this sets him up well for the light and abstract world of the musical, in which the broad canvas, rich detail and ensemble are more important than the intense close-up or the dramatic long take. Coppola shows real sensitivity to the music, keeping rhythms going with natural-looking background movement – check out the way the crowd shifts behind Petula Clark and Don Francks during "Look to the Rainbow". He also uses his harmonious technique to draw attention to the lyrics, for example having the camera pan up to the heavens on the line "Skies could be so bluish blue" in "Something Sort of Grandish".

The conventions of the time and the sensibilities of the young production team have certainly left their mark on Finian's Rainbow. There are many thinly-veiled references to hippy and protest culture, with the "tobacco"-growing enterprise, a business-like police force and even a sit-down, in a reasonable attempt to make this a musical equivalent of In the Heat of the Night. However the difference between the old and the new is too stark for them to fuse. Coppola's penchant for realism results in some stunning outdoor photography, but this only grates all the more with the woefully fake-looking studio "forest", the like of which would now only be seen in a kid's TV show. Most of the components are glorious, but as a whole it is occasionally like watching two separate films spliced together.

However, Finian's Rainbow is at least self-aware enough to realise that it has the opportunity to be a respectful homage to the classic musical, and never descends into a roughshod "update". The most profound and emotionally stirring aspect of the picture is that Astaire evidently knew it would be his last appearance as a dancer. Coppola surely knew it too, and the tender staging of Astaire's final scene is among the most poignant moments of self-reference in movie history.

The film version of "Finian's Rainbow" was conceived at a time when the public's interest in movie musicals was on the wane; in fact, in light of the poor critical reception accorded "Camelot" the year before, studio head Jack Warner would have been content to pull the plug on what he perceived as another sure-fire disaster. To an extent, his feelings were justified - what had been a daringly provocative look at racial strife in the deep American South as seen through the eyes of a scheming Irishman and his less-than-supportive daughter when it debuted on Broadway in 1947 was no longer very pertinent twenty-one years later, and the fairy tale aspects of the plot - which included the hyperactive antics of a leprechaun intent on retrieving his "borrowed" pot of gold - were going to be a hard sell in 1968. The score, although exquisitely timeless and highly recognizable, was old-fashioned in its theatricality and not likely to result in a best-selling cast album. Furthermore, directing the project was a virtual unknown, a "hippie" from northern California named Francis Ford Coppola, with only one prior film - a non-musical - to his credit. Given the odds the movie was doomed, Warner basically maintained a "hands-off, don't-ask, don't-tell" policy and simply hoped for the best.

The end result may not have been the "best", but it is considerably better than most critics described it upon its release. The overlong book, with several insignificant sub-plots, could have used some judicious trimming. Tommy Steele's performance as Og, the slowly-turning-into-a-human leprechaun, is frantically overblown. The film's editing is criminal in that Fred Astaire's feet are often unseen in his dance routines. And the attempt to blend reality and make-believe results in an awkwardly uneven balance of the two - Coppola would have been far more successful had he decided to emphasize the whimsical and play down the outdated political aspects of the story. But for all these shortcomings, "Finian's Rainbow" - from its spectacular opening credits to its nicely staged farewell to Finian - almost a goodbye to Astaire himself, for whom this would be his last dancing role - is pleasant entertainment, buoyed by its familiar score and anchored by the presence of Petula Clark, whose delightfully fresh and sweetly seductive performance is the true gold to be discovered here. At the time known in the States as the pop singer responsible for the mega-hit "Downtown", Clark drew on her previous experience as an actress in mostly grade-B British films and developed a character whose acceptance of a leprechaun hiding in the backyard well is as easily believed as her skepticism regarding her father's plot to multiply his borrowed gold by burying it in the shadows of Fort Knox and her fiancé's plans to grow mentholated tobacco. The Arlen/Harburg score - including such standards as "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?" and "Look to the Rainbow" - could well have been composed specifically for her voice, which wraps itself around each note with a hint of a brogue and - in the case of "Old Devil Moon" - a raw sensuality suggesting the woman inside the sweet Irish colleen. Deservedly, Clark was nominated for a Best Actress Golden Globe for her portrayal of Sharon McLonergan, and if for nothing else, her performance makes "Finian's Rainbow" definitely worth a look-see.

Opening on Broadway in 1947 with music by Burton Lane and lyrics by E.Y. "Yip" Harburg (who wrote the lyrics for 1939's THE WIZARD OF OZ), FINIAN'S RAINBOW was an unexpected smash that generated one pop classic after another--"How Are Things In Glocca Morra?," "Old Devil Moon," and "Look To The Rainbow" to name but three. But when talk turned to a film version, not a single studio in Hollywood would touch it: although the story was fantasy, it was also extremely satirical, contained elements that had a decidedly socialist edge, and made one of the most wickedly funny statements on racism seen up to that time. With Hollywood operating under the production code and the nation drifting into the communist paranoia of the 1950s, the whole thing was impossibly hot. And so FINIAN'S RAINBOW remained off the screen for over twenty years... until 1968, when a sudden splash of popular screen musicals prompted Warner Brothers to bankroll it.

The plot is deliberately ridiculous, and finds Irishman Finian McLonergan (Fred Astaire) and his long suffering daughter Sharon (Petula Clark) in Tennessee, where Finian plans to bury a crock of gold stolen from a leprechaun (Tommy Steele) on the theory that the land around Fort Knox will make the gold grow. But things take an unexpected turn when they arrive in Rainbow Valley, where they encounter a commune of black and white tobacco sharecroppers doing battle with a viciously bigoted Senator (Keenan Wynn.) And when daughter Sharon is outraged by the Senator's racism and happens to be standing by the hidden crock of gold--she accidentally "wishes" the Senator black! Unlike the 1947 stage show, the big screen version of FINIAN'S RAINBOW tanked at the box office, and it is little wonder: both producers and then-novice director Francis Ford Coppola made a host of very basic mistakes with the material, the first of which was not keeping the film within its original 1940s context; they instead give it a 'contemporary' tone that not only undercuts the fanciful storyline but makes many of the story's elements seem heavy-handed. In the process they manage to blunt the edge of the original in a very significant sort of way. There are also a number of cinematic problems with the movie, which feels awkwardly filmed and still more awkwardly edited, and the film visibly shifts between outdoor set-ups and studio soundstage sets in a very uncomfortable sort of way.

All of that said, there is still a great deal to enjoy in FINIAN'S RAINBOW--the aforementioned score for one and the truly memorable performances for another. Astaire is timeless, Tommy Steele almost walks away with the show, Keegan Wynn (in spite of some rather ill-advised make-up) gives a memorable performance as the bigoted Senator, and Al Freeman Jr. is absolutely hilarious in the sequence where he applies for the job of butler in the Senator's home--I laugh just thinking about it! But the real revelation here is Petula Clark. Best known as a pop singer, Clark is perfection as Sharon McLonergan; it is a tremendous pity that she was never again so well-cast on screen. And together they manage to gloss over most of the film's weaknesses; if you're a musical fan, you're likely to enjoy it.

Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer

I first saw this movie as a young girl and developed an instant crush on Tommy Steele. The storyline is very entertaining with a keen sense of humor. It was also great seeing Fred Astaire again - I'm a big fan. This movie has some of the most memorable songs which are still among my favorites, of course many of them featuring Petula Clarke. If you are a fan of musicals and enjoy a bit of the blarney - then this movie will be right up your ally.