Surely there are few enterprises in the history of film musical comedy stranger than this one. Sure, "Finian's Rainbow" is a wonderful musical, with Burton Lane's best music and some of Yip Harburg's cutest and wittiest lyrics. But it's a musical from 1947, and this film was made in the late 60s. Add to the mix the elder statesman if film musicals Fred Astaire and then give him a director in Francis Ford Coppola who is hip and energetic and young enough to maybe be his grandson, and you have a strange brew.
The movie is actually very enjoyable in my opinion. Everyone in all the books on Astaire, musicals, or Coppola that I've read has tried to come up with explanations for its failure, but I think that the film just isn't quite compelling enough and must have seemed very stale to audiences at that time. The quaint devices that Harburg uses to make his progressive ideas easier for the audience to swallow had already become a bit ridiculous by the late 60s. For example, here we have a very intelligent and well-educated black man, played by Al Freeman Jr., and that's not something you see every day in a 60s film, much less in the 40s. But his job is to create a new kind of mentholated cigarette. So you demolish one stereotype but play games with another.
Nevertheless, the racial element of the play presents some of the film's most amusing and interesting episodes, centered around the racist Senator played by Keenan Wynn. Good old Keenan, he's one of my favorite actors and I've just accidentally seen him in 3 movies just this week. The guy worked a LOT. I thought he was very funny here in his scenes with Al Freeman Jr. and Tommy Steele. The role allows him to show off his great range.
On a certain level of course the film is a vehicle for Astaire, and it is indeed a very nice send-off in some ways. But you're still yearning for a really solid dance number from the great man as the credits roll. The one time it really looked like he was cutting loose, Coppola foolishly kept the camera angle in a medium shot so we couldn't even see his feet. As a result, this was the first Astaire movie I ever saw and I went away from it years ago thinking that Tommy Steele was a better dancer than Fred Astaire.
Steele himself might have been sort of annoying, but the role demands a lot of whimsy and I think Steele did a very good job. Petula Clark looks, sounds, and generally performs great in her role; she sounds just like Ella Logan on the OC album when she sings "Glocamora." But she and Don Francks seem quite a bit old to be the ingénue couple, which might have contributed to the film's lack of friction at the box office. But his voice is fantastic, and once you get used to his horrendous hairpiece he's a joy to watch. He and Clark duet very nicely on "Old Devil Moon", although the distinctively late 60s "lounge" style instrumental arrangement is quite bizarre (Burton Lane meets Burt Bacharach?).
I am not a fan of Coppola's direction here. Not only does he fail to get the best of Astaire's dancing, but all the group dance scenes (choreographed by the great Hermes Pan) seem dead in the water for some reason. There's a feeling of forced joyousness to the picnic scenes, like a second-rate version of the picnic in "Pajama Game." In the middle of "Devil Moon" he puts the camera directly overhead of the actors, a good example of showy direction that adds nothing to the feel of the scene. There's even a few scenes where it seems like it wasn't blocked correctly; it's stuff that his mentor Roger Corman wouldn't even do. Perhaps Coppola was intimidated by the whole studio apparatus on his first real big job (not making a movie for Corman or with the AIP studio head's mistress, that is). When the Francks character is arriving, he treats us to a stunning zoom shot through a train and out of the caboose. But why? The shot makes it seem as if something very dramatic is about to happen, but nothing really materializes to justify it. Unfortunately Coppola himself never really outgrew his tendency towards pointless stylistic flourishes, and it's painfully discordant with such a quaint show as this one.
But all in all in my opinion the film is a winner. It's very funny, the songs are great, and there's just enough moments of genuine joy to justify the running length.
The movie is actually very enjoyable in my opinion. Everyone in all the books on Astaire, musicals, or Coppola that I've read has tried to come up with explanations for its failure, but I think that the film just isn't quite compelling enough and must have seemed very stale to audiences at that time. The quaint devices that Harburg uses to make his progressive ideas easier for the audience to swallow had already become a bit ridiculous by the late 60s. For example, here we have a very intelligent and well-educated black man, played by Al Freeman Jr., and that's not something you see every day in a 60s film, much less in the 40s. But his job is to create a new kind of mentholated cigarette. So you demolish one stereotype but play games with another.
Nevertheless, the racial element of the play presents some of the film's most amusing and interesting episodes, centered around the racist Senator played by Keenan Wynn. Good old Keenan, he's one of my favorite actors and I've just accidentally seen him in 3 movies just this week. The guy worked a LOT. I thought he was very funny here in his scenes with Al Freeman Jr. and Tommy Steele. The role allows him to show off his great range.
On a certain level of course the film is a vehicle for Astaire, and it is indeed a very nice send-off in some ways. But you're still yearning for a really solid dance number from the great man as the credits roll. The one time it really looked like he was cutting loose, Coppola foolishly kept the camera angle in a medium shot so we couldn't even see his feet. As a result, this was the first Astaire movie I ever saw and I went away from it years ago thinking that Tommy Steele was a better dancer than Fred Astaire.
Steele himself might have been sort of annoying, but the role demands a lot of whimsy and I think Steele did a very good job. Petula Clark looks, sounds, and generally performs great in her role; she sounds just like Ella Logan on the OC album when she sings "Glocamora." But she and Don Francks seem quite a bit old to be the ingénue couple, which might have contributed to the film's lack of friction at the box office. But his voice is fantastic, and once you get used to his horrendous hairpiece he's a joy to watch. He and Clark duet very nicely on "Old Devil Moon", although the distinctively late 60s "lounge" style instrumental arrangement is quite bizarre (Burton Lane meets Burt Bacharach?).
I am not a fan of Coppola's direction here. Not only does he fail to get the best of Astaire's dancing, but all the group dance scenes (choreographed by the great Hermes Pan) seem dead in the water for some reason. There's a feeling of forced joyousness to the picnic scenes, like a second-rate version of the picnic in "Pajama Game." In the middle of "Devil Moon" he puts the camera directly overhead of the actors, a good example of showy direction that adds nothing to the feel of the scene. There's even a few scenes where it seems like it wasn't blocked correctly; it's stuff that his mentor Roger Corman wouldn't even do. Perhaps Coppola was intimidated by the whole studio apparatus on his first real big job (not making a movie for Corman or with the AIP studio head's mistress, that is). When the Francks character is arriving, he treats us to a stunning zoom shot through a train and out of the caboose. But why? The shot makes it seem as if something very dramatic is about to happen, but nothing really materializes to justify it. Unfortunately Coppola himself never really outgrew his tendency towards pointless stylistic flourishes, and it's painfully discordant with such a quaint show as this one.
But all in all in my opinion the film is a winner. It's very funny, the songs are great, and there's just enough moments of genuine joy to justify the running length.