FINIAN'S RAINBOW (1968)

Another case of once socially progressive ideas/ideals turned hopelessly regressive by the time it got to the screen, this hard to revive B’way show with its immensely charming score proved something of a last call for a host of Hollywood vets (in front & behind the camera) and utterly incompatible with a whelp Francis Ford Coppola trying to make a film musical en plein-air, seasoned with a dash of New Wave tics.  Lyricist’s E.Y. Harburg’s head-scratching book brings Fred Astaire’s Finian from Ireland to America with a pot of stolen Leprechaun gold to bury near Fort Knox where it’s bound to multiply; a mint-flavored tobacco leaf that neither burns nor smokes; a racially mixed Southern commune to sing & dance behind the leads; a manly foreman to strum a guitar & fall for Finian’s daughter Petulia Clark; a racist Senator transformed into a Black man as a lesson in equality; a girl who dances rather than . . STOP!, go back to that Black transformation. God knows, this BlackFace element has stopped many attempts at revival.  (Actually easy to finesse; simply have everyone react as if there’d been a change in his makeup.)  Well, you get the idea.  Post-war ‘40 race issues, mixed with populist ‘30s ideas Harburg loyally stuck with.  But in this disaster, even the great songs feel off, arranged to ape ‘Pop’ 45s of the day, while the longer comic scenes flatline.  Stick it out to be rewarded with the one number that shows what Coppola must have been aiming at, a close harmony number for an all-Black quartet, ‘Necessity.’  Only, you’ve got to hold your nose since one of the quartet is a substitute, Keenan Wynn as that Senator in BlackFace.  Yikes!  And even that isn’t as hard to watch as Tommy Steele’s super-charged Leprechaun.  He makes Mickey Rooney look laid back.  (And yes, our poster is indeed a Paperback Tie-In.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Is this the shortest male cast in Hollywood history?  Fred Astaire, Tommy Steele, Don Francks, Al Freeman Jr., none over 5' 7".

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  Make that LISTEN TO THIS.  From Hollywood’s ‘What-If’ file.  Independent animators John & Faith Hubley got as far as story-boarding FINIAN in the mid-‘50s to a finished soundtrack when the plug was pulled.  Frank Sinatra stars, with Ella Logan & David Wayne (from the original B’way cast), plus Louis Armstrong, Jim Backus, Barry Fitzgerald and Ella Fitzgerald.  It’s never appeared, but this LINK has about twenty minutes of often fascinating outtakes, mostly Sinatra.  But the best comes late when Ella Fitzgerald takes on “Necessity.’  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5uNOZdgiEw