State Fair
Directed by Walter Lang
Starring: Jeanne Craine, Dick Haymes, Dana Andrews and Vivian Blaine.
I am an unabashed Rodgers & Hammerstein fan. I used to get strange looks when I had really long hair, walking down the street in a black t-shirt, singing “I’m as corny as Kansas in August, high as a flag on the fourth of July.”
I was originally going to pick Oklahoma!, for the reasons I outlined in this thread. However, as I thought more about it, I came to realize that State Fair presented a more interesting look at the development of the film musical.
Oscar Hammerstein II had a new idea for the musical. With partner Jerome Kern, he wrote a play based on Edna Ferber’s novel Showboat, and created one of the earliest instances of an “integrated” musical, where song, dance and plot were one. This idea reached apogee in 1943 when Hammerstein and his new partner Richard Rodgers wrote Oklahoma!, which in addition to becoming one of the most successful Broadway plays ever written (running almost the entire decade), became the first musical to sport fully integrated musical numbers. (We have discussed this before in this thread.) In 1955, the film version would be released, marking the first filmed fully integrated musical.
In 1945, Twentieth Century Fox wanted to make Oklahoma!, which they either couldn’t or wouldn’t do (I’m not sure which) as it was still running on Broadway. Instead, they hired Rodgers & Hammerstein to do something the pair would only do once in their career: write a score and lyrics directly for a film. Fox decided to remake Philip Stong’s novel “State Fair” in Technicolor. Fox had already adapted the book twelve years earlier as a starring vehicle for Janet Gaynor.
All these factors combined produced a strange beast. Rodgers & Hammerstein were writing the songs for someone else’s existing adaptation, rather than having created their own play from the source material (as would be the norm for the rest of their career). In addition, the team had almost no creative control over the film, as they were simply being paid to write lyrics and music.
Picked to star were hardboiled-noir antihero Dana Andrews and starlet Jeanne Crain (whom Eve obitufied here). The film was directed by Walter Lang, a Fox director of big Technicolor musicals of the 40’s and 50’s, including The King And I (Rodgers & Hammerstein), My Mother Wore Tights, Tin Pan Alley, There’s No Business Like Showbusiness, The Little Princess and Cheaper By The Dozen, with Jeanne Crain.
I picked the film because it represents a fascinating intermediate. The storyline is rather banal (though enjoyable), exhibiting outdated gender politics as well as contrivances of plot (falling in love and deciding to get married after three days, etc). The film follows a standard film musical structure, plot interrupted by random song and dance numbers, but the oddity is that the random song and dance numbers are (or at least attempt to be) integral to the plot.
The film has an earnesty (a R&H trademark) that you can’t help but like. The whimsical fair scenes, the ridiculously choregraphed dance numbers. This is a movie that had the Depression-era feel good musical as its base with the innovativeness of Rodgers & Hammerstein driving it. Although some of the songs are top-notch (It Might As Well Be Spring is an all-time favorite of mine), the inanity of others (I Owe Ioway) along with their over-the-top orchestration and delivery produce a garish, Grand Guignol caricature of American musicals. One is reminded of the Iron Curtain musicals, featuring large groups of the younger proletariat, excitedly dancing about in empty factories and extolling in song the virtues of state-owned means of production and the acumen of the central planners.
There is something strange yet compelling about watching a film whose sole source of dramatic tension is an ill pig. The running gag with Donald Meek and the overly-brandied mincemeat is mildly amusing, but overall, the film is shockingly dull. The bizarre counterpoint to this is provided by the eminently watchable quality lent the film by the songs. Compared to the later musicals Rodgers & Hammerstein would produce, this is almost unrecognizable as the genuine article. Yet the creative genius of the pair still manages to shine through, presenting an odd chimerical intermediate in the development of the film musical.
Above all, the film is warm and nostalgic and it makes you feel good watching it. Isn’t that the most important thing?
