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Rating:  -
This is a too long movie, that needn't be. Don Francks, and Petula Clark are just wonderful, if not exceptional, and really make you regret how few movies they made. The content was of the times, race relations, prejudice, and money, all in a song and wonderful story. However it really didn't need an intermission. ( It's not "Gone With the Wind"). The stars really kept this from being a "Movie of the Week" also director Francis Ford Coppola, showed his talent in this regard. Astaire is what you would expect. A true Star. This is a crossover Musical like the strange "Tommy" and sadly could only expect things like "Zanado" in it's wake. Till 25 year later when "Moulin Rouge" brought the musical back into relevance.
Rating: -
Roguish Irishman Finian McLonergan (Fred Astaire) arrives in Rainbow Valley near Fort Knox with his daughter Sharon (Petula Clark) to test out his theory of economics - that if he plants a crock of gold stolen from the leprechauns, it will grow. Unfortunately for his plans, a Leprechaun (Tommy Steele) has followed him to retrieve the gold, a racist senator wants to buy the land he has buried it in and his daughter is accused of witchcraft when an ill-advised wish comes true...
Unlike many of the roadshow musicals of the Sixties, Finian's Rainbow doesn't feel overlong or overblown - despite being shot in 70mm, it keeps the scale small and retains much of the charm of the original show in the process. The direction is energetic and fluid, with some beautiful camerawork and the odd experimental touches - Woody's arrival features similar racing tracking shots to the ones Coppola used in Bram Stoker's Dracula - but the style never takes over. This is certainly considerably lighter on its feet than Coppola's very maudlin One From the Heart and much more involving. There's a sense of fun to Finian's Rainbow that doesn't come over in any of his later films, making it surprisingly enjoyable and hard to dislike.
The score - How Are Things in Glockamora?, That Old Devil Moon, Something Sort of Grandish and Follow the Rainbow - is better than you remember, boasting some very surreal lyrics, and the script is often genuinely witty and always good natured. The racial satire is surprisingly deftly handled considering the similarities to the rather heavy-handed The Watermelon Man: at one point Al Freeman Jr is taught how to shuffle like a black man when employed by the senator (Wynn), who is later turned into a black himself and rejected by his cronies.
Of the cast, bad Oirish accents notwithstanding, only Don Francks fails to engage. A colourless leading man with the look of a badly drawn Gene Kelly crossed with Frederic Forrest, he has a strong voice but ultimately lacks the charisma to carry off the romantic lead - and for someone whose great money-making scheme is to grow mentholated tobacco thus condemning a large number of the inhabitants of Rainbow Valley to lung cancer to appeal in this day-and-age, he needs all the charisma he can get.
Hermes Pan's choreography is adequate to the occasion but not particularly inspired, especially with Astaire's solos. He is not always helped by Coppola's direction, which often breaks the action into different settings, making it hard to maintain continuity in a routine. At other times, he shoots the dancers from the waist up, taking too long to pull back for a full body shot to show the whole body at work. However, Something Sort of Grandish, imaginatively and amusingly shot around a washing line, is beautifully handled, and his use of the Scope frame for The Girl I'm Near is flawless.
The picture quality is clear and crisp, and the [Overture, Intermission and Exit Music have all been retained. Alongside an introduction and commentary by Coppola and the theatrical trailer there's also a half-hour TV broadcast of the film's premiere but not, curiously enough, the short film about the making of the feature that was shot by Coppola's then-protégé, one George Lucas.
Rating: -
Movies are to us Americans what opera was to the Italians or what the great nineteenth-century novels were to the English: the most dynamic expression of our culture. Like other art forms, movies have expressed, interpreted, and shaped our values, our interests, and our beliefs.
The movie "Finain's Rainbow" was made in the late 1960s, and is based on a moderately successful but long-forgetten stage musical of the late 1940s. Francis Ford Coppola's brilliant direction brought this tale up to date in a way that resonated with audiences in 1970. The original play was rather daring in its time, combining a direct attack on racism with a lighthearted populist-style socialism. By 1970, when the movie hit the big screen across America, racism was no longer respectable, and the attack on it no longer controversial. Most of the socialist theme in the original was expunged from the movie, and what was left was treated very lightly.
What remains is a delightful(for my taste) fantasy about an Irishman (Fred Astair) who comes to America with his daughter (Petula Clark) in search of a place to bury a pot of gold he has stolen from a Leprechaun in the old country. Fred Astair's character is not quite a con man, and yet not quite of this earth, either. Petula Clark is radient, and Tommy Steele as the leprechaun is a delight. "The Mclonergan theory of economics" as only Fred Astair can tell it is one of the best scenes in any movie, in my opinion.
The anti-racist element in the movie is almost a subplot until the final few minutes, when all the story lines are brought together. Finian finds himself in a sharecropper community in Kentucky, in which a fantasy version of full racial integration is practised. Those of us who saw this movie in 1970 knew very well that no such community really existed; but it encouraged us to ask ourselves, "why not? Can't we do better as a nation?" For me, that was an uplifting message.
The one thing that modern audiences will not relate to is the sharecropper community's goal of achieving prosperity by growing better tobacco. All I can really say in defense of that part of the story is this: I hope audiences today can see the tobacco experiment in the movie as a holdover from an earlier time, and as a metaphor for better community improvement.
Give "Finian's Rainbow" a try. I think you will be pleasantly surprised.
Rating: -
This movie is a modern version of "Brigadoon" set in the 60's.
It is light with good songs and dancing sequences.
It is very much a family movie, however probable politically incorrect in todays enviroment because the story line is centered around the production of smokeless tobbacco.
Its a long movie but if you like musicals and old fashioned values you will enjoy this movie.
Rating: -
This was a good overall movie. I think there was a touch too much leprechan time though. Some numbers where a little long. But........Fred Astaire, 69, dancing up and down boxes...Hurray for him! Nice Dancing!
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