The blarney’s thicker than yesterday’s porridge in this bowl of Irish whimsy from Disney. But thanks to Winton Hoch ’s lush lensing (real location work on THE QUIET MAN may have aided his fakery) & Peter Ellenshaw ’s legendary matte paintings, a tactile sense of fairy logic lets the fantasy play out with real charm. (And finding 3-strip Technicolor & Academy ratio framing is a neat surprise in 1959. You certainly feel their positive effect.) Albert Sharpe (Finian in B’way’s FINIAN’S RAINBOW) is the estate caretaker who gets mixed up with leprechauns while his daughter (Janet Munro) falls reluctantly in love with his putative replacement, an amazingly young & handsome Sean Connery. It’s all played at a very high pitch, Sean even gets to sing a song or two, but the carefully crafted analogue tricks are wonderfully convincing and nicely match the tall tale’s tone. Unexpected fun, if you can swallow all the brogue.
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