| Francis Ford Coppola's bizarre, surprising 1968 FINIAN'S RAINBOW | |
| Last Edit: singleticket 07:31 pm EDT 03/18/21 | |
| Posted by: singleticket 07:17 pm EDT 03/18/21 | |
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| I saw it for the first time on TCM and found it fascinating. It reminded me of the French 60's musicals of Jacques Demy. Coppola films largely on location in Southern California dressed to look like somewhere in Kentucky in an almost intentionally half-assed way. At the beginning he seems embarassed by the production numbers but as the musical goes on the broad sweep of his filmmaking makes them lift off and soar. Coppola takes advantage of the open space and the dance sequences keep opening up in terms of boundaries, sometimes levitating up in the air. Tommy Steele is tooth rottingly fey as usual but he makes sense here and he's a gifted performer. Also surprising is Don Francks as Woody Mahoney, wearing what looks like an unfortunate toupee. But his bossa nova inspired "Old Devil Moon" with Petula Clark is truly swoon worthy. Al Freeman Jr. as Howard the inventor is adorable. The story makes no sense but it moves along with a playful momentum. The sharecroppers in their Californian mileu look slightly cultish, like a cross between a multi-cultural Waldorf school and a Jim Jones camp. Harburg and Saidy's utopian fable was already a kind of a back looking anachronism in the late 1940's. It looked back to American agrarian populism, something that was already dying if not dead, and the Popular Front which was also under attack but also forward to the Civil Rights movement. It feels somehow of a piece in Coppola's hodgepodge of a movie where stars of a fading Hollywood mix with New Wave filmmaking. It's a mess but its inventive energy might have reignited other musical movies that died on the screen. |
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