Like all lazy, half-assed pop-culture historians, I like to reduce complicated, contradictory cultural movements to cartoonish stereotypes. So I can assure you, dear reader, that at the tail end of the Sixties©, society had fractured into two warring camps. On one side stood, or rather slouched, Johnny Acid Freak, who rocked out to psychedelic jams with fuck buddy Lucy Love-In at a kaleidoscopic Be-In before heading over to the local anarchist co-op to watch experimental 16MM film strips and drop some Blue Sunshine while his buddies got their groove on in a three-day drum circle. On the other side stood Sid and Suzy Squaresville, Johnny's parents. They spent their days and nights eating TV dinners, knocking back martinis, fretting about whether Negroes might move into their neighborhoods, and voting for Herbert Hoover even though he died in 1964.
Yes, the times, they were a-changing. It didn't take a weatherman to tell which way the wind was blowing. Also, something was happening here but what it was wasn't exactly clear. Lastly, folks met the new boss and concluded it was the same as the old boss and many other beloved '60s clichés. After 1967's Bonnie & Clyde and especially 1969's Easy Rider, youth was king. But the squares weren't giving up without a fight. Old Hollywood had no idea how to handle the seismic cultural changes of the '60s and the ensuing youthquake, so it did what it always does when faced with a crisis: It threw money at the problem and retreated back into the familiar and already successful. For many studios, that meant mounting huge, bloated productions of Broadway hits in a doomed attempt to recapture the monumental success of 1965's The Sound Of Music.
Who needed color television or reefer sticks and swinging chicks when they could get their kicks watching Rex Harrison talk to animals in garish Technicolor? Or Julie Andrews kicking up her heels as legendary vaudevillian Gertrude Lawrence? Or Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood singing, dancing, and prancing as weirdly homoerotic cowpokes embroiled in a creepy ménage a trois with Jean Seberg? There was only one problem with this strategy: These movies were, for the most part, terrible and terribly expensive. Furthermore, audiences rejected them. They were dinosaurs, pure and simple. Despite what Ben Stein might argue, evolution has a funny way of killing off dinosaurs and rewarding the cunning and adaptive.
1968's Finian's Rainbow, today's entry in My Year Of Flops, consequently represents a strange marriage of Old Hollywood and New. It was one of the last gasps of the crumbling studio system and the road show, old-school mentality, yet it was directed by the nascent Godfather of New Hollywood, Francis Ford Coppola.
Throughout the '70s, Francis Ford Coppola stood proud and erect at the forefront of American film. He was endowed with massive gifts as an artist and filmmaker. Masterpieces like The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now throbbed with ambition and excitement. They penetrated the public consciousness like few films before or since. What I'm trying to say, dear reader, is that throughout the Me Decade, Coppola violated the body of American film over and over again. But in a good way. I apologize if this paragraph offends the sensibilities of some of our more delicate readers (I realize that a full 70 percent of our readership consists of mint-julep-sipping Southern Belles who faint at the first hint of ribaldry) but I'm writing about a family-friendly leprechaun musical and I've gotta get my crude double entendres in there somewhere.
But before Coppola was King Shit of Fuck Mountain and the charismatic alpha-male all his peers looked up to, he was just another ambitious young director angling for a chance to put all those countless hours of daydreaming in the dark to good use. Like so many of his peers he'd gotten his MFA from a respected film school (UCLA) and done the requisite apprenticeship under Roger Corman before graduating to the big leagues with 1966's UCLA thesis film You're A Big Boy Now. But his experience mounting musicals was limited to directing a few during high school.
As Coppola tells it on Finian's Rainbow's shockingly candid audio commentary, he was the wrong man for the job in every conceivable way. Coppola fancied himself a New Wave-style auteur. Warner Bros saw him as a cheap gun-for-hire. Coppola envisioned a musical filmed on location with contemporary choreography from a hip, young renegade. Warner countered with transparently fake sets literally leftover from Camelot and aged choreographer Hermes Pan, who was fired halfway through filming for his old-timey, Depression-era ways. Coppola wanted to make socially relevant, forward-thinking projects. The studio saddled him with a 1947 dinosaur with a cornball sensibility older than its 69-year-old star, Fred Astaire.
That's the irony of Finian's Rainbow: It was ahead of its time in 1947 and hopelessly behind the times in 1968. It was meekly asking for a place at the table for Negroes at a time when blacks were raising their fists and angrily demanding social, political and economic power. In 1947, film audiences apparently weren't ready for a wealth-redistribution scheme even if it was rooted in the sturdy foundation of leprechaun magic.
Finian's Rainbow was probably a little too progressive and rabble-rousing for its own good. With a hero based on Woody Guthrie, a satirical subplot in which a racist senator comes to understand the evils of racism after he's transformed into a black man, and magically leftylicious heroes who are all about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, the play is very clearly the product of a New Deal/Popular Front mindset that envisioned a quasi-Socialist utopia without poverty or crippling social/financial inequality. If Finian's Rainbow were a person, it'd probably vote for Eugene V. Debs, belong to a food co-op, and recycle like a motherfucker.
In 1947 that was enough to get a fellow blacklisted as a Fellow Traveler at best, and a dirty, stinking "Kumbaya"-singing Commie at worst. It doesn't seem at all coincidental that Mr. Magoo creator John Hubley's early attempts to adapt the musical as a feature-length cartoon with Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong in key roles was squashed after the legendary animator refused to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
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