At 2 hours and 20 minutes, Finian's Rainbow, is a musical about racism in the South with a magical leprechaun running around. It required several nights of viewing to sit through. 69 year old Fred Astaire was way past his prime and it was a little embarrassing to watch him perform some of the dance numbers. He still had a lot of grace and charm which compensated for his diminished skills as a dancer.
Tommy Steele as Og the leprechaun always seemed to be one of the most strident musical comedy performers in this history of musicals. He over performs every song in the Liza Minnelli tradition of clobbering the audience over the head to show how talented he is.
There are a lot of nice things about Finian's Rainbow. The score is really good with lots of decent and several very good songs. Petula Clark is also very good playing Astaire's daughter and sings the two best songs in the film.
The producers wanted a younger director for this musical and hired Francis Ford Coppola to direct. He must have had his hands full with an aging star, an outdated story about sharecroppers living in racial harmony and non existent choreography. Working with a larger budget, the young director had previously only made small independent and cheap films. Coppola staged many of the musical numbers outdoors to bring some movement to the film. This was an approach that Astaire apparently didn't much care for.
Compared to something like Hello Dolly, or Star, Finian's Rainbow at least has some charm to it. Unfortunately the movie was pretty outdated by 1968.
141 minutes, written by Yip Harburg and Fred Saidy.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment