Review of Finian's Rainbow (1968) by Mike S — 19 Mar 2015

1968's Finian's Rainbow is 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.

As Coppola tells it on Finian's Rainbow's shockingly candid audio commentary, he was the wrong man to direct this movie 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. Warner countered with transparently fake sets literally leftover from Camelot. 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.

I found much to like and dislike about Finian's Rainbow, from forest sets that look unmistakably like an Astroturf showroom to a bloated running time made even longer by a musical prelude and intermission. I was rooting unashamedly for the avuncular old pro and the whiz kid to beat the odds, to transform hokey old material into something fresh and relevant. So I was willing to overlook many of the film's flaws in light of its underdog charm and gentle humanism. There is a certain glory in its failure. It's a relic of a very strange period in Hollywood's rocky evolution, and it ranks somewhere between a footnote and a lost gem in Coppola's wildly uneven filmography. It's both fascinating and frustrating watching Coppola-who admits in the commentary that he didn't meet a black person until he was 22-try to reconcile the yawning gulf between the racial and social attitudes of 1947 and 1967.

Rainbow is almost worth checking out for its commentary alone and the way Coppola spends part of the time mapping out the ballsy, contemporary, much, much shorter film he should have made and the rest of it bemoaning the imperfect charmer he did make. I am probably alone in hoping that Coppola someday gets to re-edit the film however he sees fit. Heck, if George Lucas can toy with the Star Wars universe to his heart's content then Coppola-who met Lucas on the film's set-should be allowed to make a director's cut of Finian's Rainbow.