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How sad is this?

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

"Finian's Rainbow" is a musical that never achieves what it should have, given the talents involved.Fred Astaire plays the whimsical Finian, who travels to America in search of the perfect place to put down roots and fulfill his magical calling. Petula Clark plays his long-suffering daughter, following across glaciers and into the Grand Canyon (if you can believe the nonsensical montage during the credits) to a little valley in Kentucky that is populated with simple folk who dance and sing daily.Fred's dancing is, at times, delightful. At other times, it is too derivative of his own earlier performances. Petula Clark is the best thing in the film, with a voice that caresses the Irish dialect and makes each song special. There is some beautiful music in "Finian's Rainbow", notably "Look to the Rainbow" and "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?"It is said that Hermes Pan was fired because his choreography was too dated. During some dance sequences the choreography does feel too old.Director Francis Ford Coppola created a film that has some wonderful moments mixed with some mediocre, slow sections. I prefer his very stylish take on the musical form, "One From the Heart", but "Finian's Rainbow" is worth watching, if only to see Fred and Petula.

Finian (Fred Astaire) and his daughter (Petula Clark) arrive in the fictional Southern American state of Missitucky. There, Finian encounters several problems--including a leprechaun who wants his pot of gold back, a racist senator and the need to marry off his daughter. How all these are worked out are something for you to discover if you decide to see the film."Finian's Rainbow" was a very successful play back in 1947. However, because it directly addressed racial prejudice, studios passed on making a film out of it. Efforts to have the play 'cleaned up' to please a wider (in other words, more prejudiced) audience were in vain, as the playwright refused (justifiably) to sanitize the film. However, by 1968, its themes of racial harmony and bigotry were much more acceptable and timely--and so the film was finally made. In this sense, the film was very timely. HOWEVER, when it came to the music, by 1960s standards it was VERY corny. In particular, the songs sung by the leprechaun were amazingly bad--with some horrible lyrics. But, the bad lyrics weren't confined to his songs but occasionally popped up among other cast members (such as Clark who sang a line that went 'Zsa-Zsa Gabor-ah' and later when Astaire sung about 'dames'). Because of this, a bit of trimming would have greatly improved the film--making it far less dated and silly. Plus, the bad moments really detract from its central message of racial harmony--a laudable theme that occasionally got lose among the silliness. It also meant a few too many songs--a problem that can hurt any musical. Overall, this can truly be called a mixed bag. While it stars Fred Astaire and I LOVE him in films, this just isn't all that great a film. A time-passer--and that's about all--even though it has some nice moments.By the way, for years Fred Astaire was NEVER shown dancing in films unless ALL of him was shown. He felt it detracted from the dancing if he wasn't shown from head to toe. Well, he did NOT negotiate such a contract with the folks making "Finian's Rainbow", as he DOES dance and you don't see him from head to toe in songs such as "The Idle Rich". Perhaps this was due to his age and his slowing down a bit--which might explain why this was his last musical.

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.

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.