In his autobiography My Life, Bill Clinton famously remarked that folks “can’t be judged by their worst or weakest moments.” Self serving as it appears, given that we all remember the former president’s weakest moments, there is a certain truth to the notion. If you rephrase it to something like “No one can be judged by their best or worst moments,” then Clinton’s reasoning becomes clear. You aren’t who you are at your best or your worst; you are your whole story. With that in mind, let’s continue our little trip through Francis Ford Coppola’s body of work with this week’s classic movie: 1968’s Finian’s Rainbow.
Roger Ebert said Finian’s Rainbow "gives you that same wonderful sense you got from Swing Time or Singin' in the Rain or any of the great musicals: that it knows exactly where it's going, and is getting there as quickly and with as much fun as possible. Remarkably, because it is only Francis Ford Coppola's second film, it is the best-directed musical since West Side Story. It is also enchanting, and that's a word I don't get to use much.” I quote at length only so I can say this: I understand that appreciation of art and entertainment is subjective, but whatever movie Ebert saw was surely not the movie I saw.
Singin’ in the Rain holds within it a cohesive aesthetic and world-class performers at the top of their game while telling a story that celebrates the joy of golden-age entertainment. Finian’s Rainbow holds within it a disjointed aesthetic, a woefully aging Fred Astaire in a story about Irish magic turning racist senators black, and a scientist obsessed with creating mentholated cigarettes.
The original production of this 1947 musical ran over 700 performances and, to all reports, has a kind of fairytale whimsy that carried the story along. Coppola seems to have attempted a realism of sorts, grounding the fantastical elements with location shooting and contemporary production design. Well, half of the movie’s like that. Northern California landscapes, a fully constructed town, the whole nine yards. The other half of the movie was shot on a sound stage. The location shooting and the sound-stage shooting give the movie a disjointed feel from which it never quite recovers, as if the Hollywood fairytale and Coppola’s more realistic vision can’t find a common ground.
Which isn’t to say that there’s no reason to watch the film. Any movie that features a nerdy African American scientist working his darndest to create menthol cigarettes has at least the virtue of unintended irony. There’s a five-minute sequence where the scientists and the romantic lead try to smoke a big rolled cigarette -- at which point it struck me that Coppola and the cast may have been blazing on something else during the making of the movie.
Once can’t ever know these things, but I got the idea while watching this attempt at renovation on the big American musical that Finian’s Rainbow is what happened when Coppola tried his hand at being a Hollywood director. Maybe he or the studios believed that the way to revitalize the movie industry was to have one of these next-generation directors make their version of the Hollywood musical. The same thing happened with Martin Scorsese, to similar results.
Ebert notwithstanding, you can tell how successful Coppola believed his excursion into Hollywood-musical territory to be by looking at his next picture, which turned its back rather harshly on any vision the studios ever had of what a movie should be.
Check in next week to see what Coppola’s next move was.