..Gary
Dretzka
..Noah
Forrest
..Leonard
Klady
..R.J.
Matson
..David
Poland
..Douglas
Pratt
..Ray
Pride
..Michael
Wilmington
Finian's Rainbow
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
..TheTrailer ..The Lyrics "Musical-comedy fever was in my family and I thought, 'Imagine if my father knew that I was going to direct a Hollywood musical, and Finian's Rainbow, much less,' because Finian's Rainbow has one of the most impressive collections of beautiful songs of any show. I knew them very well and could sing them all. I was the one person in the family who could kind of remember the songs, and so whereas I was usually on the outs with my father because of my bad marks at school, he always [had me sing songs for his friends]. I was sort of the black sheep of the family, and they were very unsure of what I would do to make a living, etc., but the fact that I could sing a song made me go over very big with my father, so of course the first thought when [producer] Joe Landon was on the phone discussing Finian's Rainbow - What I should have said is, 'No, I've decided I'm just going to direct personal films from my own scripts.'-but I thought, 'What would my father think? My father would finally think that I was a success, that my father would finally accept me as someone who had sort of made it, which is something he had wanted all his life, and despite the fact that I had a very gifted older brother who was very bright and handsome, and academically at the top of his class, and a beautiful young sister, who was darling and totally charming, that this middle boy, me, would have his day in the sun and my father would be very impressed. Imagine telling Dad, "I've just been hired to direct Finian's Rainbow for Warner Bros. by Jack Warner and, what's more, it's going to star Fred Astaire."' I confess that I decided to do it for that reason, to impress my father and to win my credentials in his eyes."
Thus does Francis Coppola open his heart on his commentary track for the wonderful 1968 musical, a Warner Home Video release (11208, $20). Coppola cringes at times as he looks back and second-guesses his youthful direction. He chastises himself for his inability to give the performers more freedom of movement and choice, and believes that he concentrated far too much on gimmicks and not enough on drawing the humanity out of the characters. He also wishes he could go back and just trim chunks out of the 145-minute running time, realizing that many dialog sequences did not deliver enough emotion or narrative to justify their length. In preparing to shoot the feature, he rehearsed extensively with the cast, which also features Petula Clark, Tommy Steele and the under-heralded Don Francks, and they performed the entire show before a live audience on the Warner lot. "I think maybe, in a way, that's what gave me perhaps a wrong direction, because I had done it as a stage production, and then when we filmed it, we used the styles and the manner of delivery that we had used in that stage production, and that's what makes the film perhaps a touch more theatrical than it ought to have been. But then again, with this kind of whimsy, maybe that theatrical style was the only way to do it. I don't even know."
What fans do know, however, is that the movie is too glorious to disparage whatever shortcomings it may have. The running time is much less of a problem on home video than it might have been in a theater, as you are more than happy to spend time with the characters and take breathers between each sparkling song. The presentation also has an Intermission and Entr'acte music. Set in a near-timeless Kentucky town, Astaire and Clarke are travelers who arrive with a stolen leprechaun's pot of gold, and the leprechaun, played by Steele, following close behind. The pot grants three wishes, mostly by accident, which change the fortunes of the community; and several people fall in love. It is, in essence, a musical milieu, with just enough narrative to sustain a sense of momentum and incorporate some unfailingly funny slapstick. The songs do the rest. Coppola can only seem to remember that the sod they were laying upon kept falling apart, but the song performed by Francks and Clark, Old Devil Moon, remains the most succulent romantic duet ever captured on film. It doesn't matter that Astaire breaks no new ground with his dances. He had reached that point in his career where the mere fact that he was gung ho enough to appear on the screen again, doing the comedy and evoking the utter class of his unique skills, was enough to leave a viewer transfixed by his every move; and surprisingly, the effects of that appearance linger even today-you view his presence as a lovely punctuation to his screen career, the last easy steps in a number that has already brought down the house.
The picture is presented in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The color transfer is lovely, with bright, shiny hues and finely detailed fleshtones. The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound brings a full dimensionality to the musical score, and solid tones. There are optional English, French and Spanish subtitles ("¿Cómo van las cosas en Glocca Morra?"), a trailer and a great 25-minute color TV broadcast of the film's New York premiere ("The surprising adventures of Finian and his friends was directed by a very surprising young man. His name is Francis Ford Coppola. Now people might take him for a hippie, but when he's working on the set, he's as efficient as any business executive.").
Coppola's commentary opens with a 5-minute introduction that includes behind-the-scenes footage. In the commentary itself, he describes his relationship with each of the actors and with the scarily veteran Warner crew that he was commanding. He talks about working in the widescreen format ("It was a source of great embarrassment to me that in a number of scenes when Fred danced, his feet were cut off. In some of the sequences where the feet seemed to have been cut off, I really don't think we had cut the feet off, but when they blew it up to 70mm, they lost 2½% of the frame, and that was very close to cutting the feet off, and in the projection of the 70mm prints, it had cut off the feet, and I was very, very, very embarrassed, but I'm relieved to see, in watching this with you now, that their feet are not cut off."), about other technical aspects of filmmaking ("You can better support the audience's curiosity in the editing by eliminating things that are basically interrupting their attention."), and recalls the different problems that confronted him in various scenes, how he coped with them, and how he might have done things differently today. He also recalls the first time he met George Lucas on the set - immediately recognizing a kindred spirit. It is a terrific talk, going into many different aspects of the movie, filmmaking, and his own outlook on existence. He picks up eagerly on one of the film's closing dialog exchanges: "I think that line has been the line of my life. I love that line -' Things are indeed hopeless, but they're not serious.'"
July 8, 2005
DVD Roundup: This Week's DVD Releases
The Review VaultDouglas Pratt's DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com
