Instant Old Age

The American Negro has endured Little Rock and Selma; he will survive Missitucky, the mythological country of Finian's Rainbow. There, on a beaming day, a father (Fred Astaire) and his daughter (Petula Clark) wander into a valley where white and cullud folks are jes a-sittin' and a-singin' and a-waitin' for somethin' to happen. Nothin' does. A leprechaun (Tommy Steele) wanders in, a lot of galvanic twitching goes on in the name of choreography, and eventually a white-supremacist Senator (Keenan Wynn) gets changed into a Negro. At the end, when everybody joins hands to shout out the coda, it is clear that this classic stage musical has wrinkled into senility. Perhaps, like the inhabitants of Shangri-La, it was condemned to instant old age the minute it left its proper environment.

The simplistic notion of the '40s that Negroes are just like whites beneath the skin is more than an embarrassment now. And Rainbow's light-headed whimsy is now done better by television, with its dreamed-of genii or married witches. Even so, the movie might have survived were it not for the ham-handed direction of Francis Ford Coppola, 29, whose only previous Hollywood feature was the moderately comic You're a Big Boy Now. Astaire and Clark are saddled with threadbare brogues, and both talk as if they were dictating letters to a tape recorder. Tommy Steele's hyperthyroid performance mistakes popped eyeballs for emotion and shrieks for singing. Coppola's idea of a scene-stopper is a bunch of flowers. Whenever the action halts, he brings on fields of roses, daffodils and chrysanthemums. Ennui is so frequent that by the end, Finian's Rainbow boasts more bouquets than a Mafia funeral.

Though a few of the Burton Lane songs--notably Old Devil Moon and Look to the Rainbow--are imperishable, most of the score is as withered as the scenario. The few attempts at updating by E. Y. Harburg, who wrote the lyrics, are ludicrous. In 1947 one couplet ran:

If this isn't love, I'm Carmen Miranda

If this isn't love, it's Red propaganda.

Now it goes:

If this isn't love, there's no Glocca Morra

If this isn't love, I'm Zsa Zsa Ga-borra.

Lyric writing is the art of compression. In two lines, Harburg has encapsulated the ineptitude of the show.

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