Charles and I watched the 1962 film The Music Man on Turner Classic Movies (in, blessedly, a letterboxed print). I hadn’t seen it since the 1960’s but I was surprised at how much I remembered — and how much more I “got” now that I’m more familiar with the culture of the period (1912) when it takes place (enough to get that some of the references were actually 1920’s phenomena that were anachronistic for the specified setting). Directed by Morton “Tec” da Costa (a stage director — his only film credits, as far as I know, are this and Auntie Mame, both of which he had previously directed on Broadway) and starring Robert Preston (repeating his role from the stage version after Cary Grant had turned it down — as he would likewise turn down My Fair Lady two years later in favor of the man who created that part on stage, Rex Harrison), it’s a not particularly stylish filming but it does reproduce a finely wrought stage piece and Preston’s overwhelming performance, and Shirley Jones is nice as the ingenue even though this must have been a dèja-vu experience to be stuck back in this kind of role two years after winning the Academy Award for playing a prostitute in Elmer Gantry. What’s strongest about The Music Man is the precision of Meredith Willson’s original piece — the smoothness with which the numbers are integrated into the action and the clever mixture of sentiment and grit (the opening “Rock Island” rap number is superb; not only does it mix speech and song engagingly, it also gives us a lot of exposition and all the backstory we need) throughout the whole piece — even if Ron[ny] Howard’s performance as the little kid (a role Willson said was based on his own boyhood) gets a bit too sticky at times (and his well-showcased inability to sing gets very wearing). While one could easily imagine a more creative, more stylish filmization of this show (imagine it with Vincente Minnelli directing and Fred Astaire and Judy Garland in the leads!), the film we have of The Music Man does a good job of reproducing the stage play and capturing the quirky Meredith Willson humor — and Shirley Jones’ singing is quite nice even though her singing and speaking voices sound so little like each other she sounds like she has a voice double even though she doesn’t! — 3/20/99
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Last night’s “feature” was The
Music Man, a 1962 Warner Bros. production
based on Meredith Willson’s nostalgic musical set in the fictitious “River
City, Iowa” but inspired by Willson’s own boyhood in the real (and mentioned in
the score in a list of Iowa towns that also included Bix Beiderbecke’s
birthplace, Davenport — well, you didn’t think I could write a blog post about
a musical set in Iowa in 1912 and not mention Bix, did you?) Mason City and inspired by a traveling music
teacher who had come to town during Willson’s boyhood. I remember not only that
I saw this movie in a theatre when it was new (remember movie
theatres?) but that my mom had the
soundtrack album, whose liner notes were by Willson himself. In them he took
pride that he and Frank Loesser were the only two people who had written entire
Broadway musicals —book, lyrics and
music — that had become hits. He also recalled his boyhood amazement that
someone who played the flute was called a “flautist” — he thought a “flautist”
should be someone who played the “flaut,” only there is no such thing. The
Music Man premiered on Broadway in 1957
with Robert Preston as Professor Harold Hill, a traveling con man who does a
boys’ band scam in small town (collecting money for instruments, band uniforms
and instruction books, then getting out of town with his ill-gotten gains) and
Barbara Cook as Marian Paroo (what sort of last name is that? It certainly doesn’t sound Irish, which Marian and
her mom, played by the great comedienne Pert Kelton are supposed to be), the
town librarian, with whom he has one of those hate-at-first-sight courtships
that of course blossoms into true love.
The show opens with “Rock Island,” set
on a train going from Illinois through Iowa, in which a group of traveling
salesmen are talking about the horrible Professor Harold Hill and how con
artists like him are ruining the prospects for genuine salesmen like himself —
and the whole number is in cadenced speech, with the sounds of the actual train
cued in to match the rhythms of the song. With my dedication to exposing
instances of what I call “first-itis” — the tendency of biographers in all
media to proclaim that the people they’re biographing were the first people to
do something when they weren’t — just after “Rock Island” ended I told Charles,
“So much for the myth that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton was the first rap musical.” Indeed, stuck with a
highly charismatic performer in the lead but one without that much of a singing
voice, Willson made Robert Preston’s big numbers on the same cusp between
singing and rapping as Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe had with Rex
Harrison’s big numbers in My Fair Lady (and would do again with Richard Burton in Camelot) — and Irving Berlin had done in the 1929 movie Hallelujah! in which the male lead — Daniel Haynes, playing a
Black revival preacher in the South — shaded over from spoken sermonizing into
rapping and then all-out singing of Berlin’s big song, “Waiting at the End of
the Road.” Preston had had a strange career trajectory; he had got a big star
buildup from Paramount in the early 1940’s that got short-circuited by the 1942
film This Gun for Hire, in which
Preston played an undercover cop who goes after a hired killer. The film was a
huge hit, but it was stolen out from under Preston by Alan Ladd, who played the
hired killer — so it was Ladd who got the big star buildup and Preston who
retreated to Broadway and remained mostly a stage performer until his
unexpected movie comeback as the Gay director of the drag show featuring Julie
Andrews as a woman playing a man playing a woman in 1982’s Victor/Victoria.
Preston was so obviously “right” for the role it
seems strange that Warner Bros. considered using someone else in the lead —
among the people they offered it to were Frank Sinatra, Dan Dailey and Cary
Grant, who reportedly told Jack Warner, “Not only will I not play in The
Music Man, but if you cast anyone other
than Robert Preston I won’t even go see it.” (He reportedly made a similar
threat in 1964 when Jack Warner, who apparently hadn’t learned his lesson,
offered Grant the role of Professor Henry Higgins in the film of Rex Harrison’s
great stage vehicle My Fair Lady.)
Jack Warner did recast the female
lead with Shirley Jones, thinking Barbara Cook had been almost exclusively a
stage star and he wanted someone with movie “cred” — and Jones had it in
spades, having played similar roles in the films of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! and Carousel (as Charles pointed out, in those films as well as in The
Music Man Jones played women in love with
abusive men — and from what I’ve heard of Jones’ real-life marriages to Jack
Cassidy and Marty Ingels, her actual husbands weren’t much better) and having
won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her anti-type casting as a
prostitute in Elmer Gantry. The
imdb.com “Trivia” posters noted that Jones nailed the part well enough that the
film didn’t run into critical brickbats from outraged Barbara Cook partisans
the way My Fair Lady did when
Jack Warner took the female lead from Julie Andrews and gave it to Audrey
Hepburn — though no doubt it helped that Jones could really sing whereas, after
Hepburn recorded two My Fair Lady songs, Warner decided her voice wasn’t good enough and brought in Marni Nixon to dub
her. (Oddly, though it’s really Shirley Jones’ voice throughout, her pitch when
she sang was discernibly lower than when she spoke. It’s noticeable throughout
the movie and in her later TV series The Partridge Family as well.)
The Music Man is a start-to-finish delight; it’s true one could
nit-pick it to death for the anachronisms (it’s supposed to be set in 1912 but
much of the music was played with the loping swing sound more characteristic of
the 1920’s or 1930’s, though some imdb.com posters got details wrong — there are cars in the movie, uneasily sharing the streets with
horse-drawn carriages, and in one sequence to a song called ‘Pick a Little,
Talk a Little” Willson compares gossiping women to clucking chickens and
director Morton DaCosta cuts between the women and a flock of actual chickens,
then back — one imdb.com contributor called this a fantasy sequence but it was
a simple cut, and in a rural town like River City, Iowa in 1912 it would not
have been an uncommon sight to see farm animals in the streets) and for Robert
Preston’s overbearing performance: it’s great for the larger-than-life
character be’s playing her but one can tell why he never became a movie star.
But I was blown away by this movie when I saw it as a kid and I still am —
especially since now I “got” references like Hill’s hope in the song “The
Sadder but Wiser Girl” for “Hester to win just one more ‘A’” which had sailed
over my head at age eight. Though the color isn’t as vivid or neon-bright as
three-strip Technicolor was in its 1940’s heyday, it’s still rich and a far cry
from the dirty greens and browns that dominate most films today, and the
winning sincerity of Shirley Jones and the just-kidding cheekiness of Robert
Preston’s con-man performance (this is probably the best film made about con
artists between the W. C. Fields vehicles of the 1930’s and The Sting in the 1970’s) along with a rich supporting cast
full of old-line character actors (notably Hermione Gingold, who plays the wife
of the mayor of River City and who makes a great effect when, as one of the
do-gooder matrons upbraiding Marian for making “dirty books” by people like
Chaucer, Rabelais and Baizac, she majestically intones the last name as
“BALLS-ac”) as well as Buddy Hackett (playing an old friend of Hill’s who’s
settled in River City and a legit job as a blacksmith’s assistant until Hill
drafts him to help his “con”) doing a number called “Shipoopi” about girls who
won’t let boys kiss them until the third date (it was supposedly 192 slang but
Willson actually made it up) and looking even more than usual like Lou
Costello. (In 1954 Hackett filled in for an ailing Costello in a film called Fireman,
Save My Child, and in 1978 he played Costello in a TV-movie biopic, Bud and Lou.)
About the only thing about this movie that bothers
me is the ending, in which the boys of River City save Hill’s bacon by staging
a band practice in which they play a predictably awful but still within hailing
distance of music rendition of Beethoven’s “Minuet in G.” The film then dissolves
into shots of a real marching band — actually an all-star ensemble of the
various top L.A.-area college bands of the period — marching through River City
and playing an impeccable version of the show’s big hit, “76 Trombones,” as
DaCosta cuts to the principals of the movie and runs titles under their images
identifying them. Given that the kids have had utterly no training on their
instruments beyond Hill leading them in group sings, and in particular they’d
have had no way of knowing that you can’t get a brass instrument to sound in
pitch just by blowing through it (you have to make a “razzberry” noise to get
the horn to vibrate), it seems to me that the only way they could possibly have
played the Minuet in G even passably well was if Marian, who moonlights as a
piano teacher at night and is therefore the only person in town with a clue about music and how to
teach people to play it, and I would have liked to see a scene in which she
smiled at Hill as it dawned on him that she had saved Hill’s reputation by secretly teaching the
boys the basics. The script for The Music Man has some intriguing credits: the credits are
Frederick Lacey and Marion Hargrove, the latter of whom wrote See
Here, Private Hargrove about his
experiences as a World War II draftee — it and his immediate sequel, What
Now, Corporal Hargrove?, got made into
movies in the 1940’s with Robert Walker playing him — and these credits and his
real-life small-town background made him one of Hollywood’s go-to guys for
stories about small towns.
The director, Morton DaCosta, has only four film
credits on imdb.com and was primarily a stage director — though when Rosalind
Russell agreed to repeat her stage role in Auntie Mame on film she insisted that DaCosta, who’d directed
her on stage, make the movie as well. In Auntie Mame DaCosta — whom Russell nicknamed “Tec” because she
thought he was especially good at the technical aspects of directing —
punctuated the movie with asides from Mame commenting on the action, filmed as
iris shots with Russell’s face spotlit in a circular close-up against an
otherwise all-black screen. He used this technique again, albeit more
sparingly, in The Music Man as
well — notably in the sequence in which the local barbershop quartet (played by
a real quartet called the Buffalo
Bills) and Shirley Jones sing two songs simultaneously in counterpoint for a
haunting effect in both sight and sound. (The only other director I can think
of who used an iris shot in a sound film is Orson Welles, at the end of the
snow scene in The Magnificent Ambersons.) There are lot of really weird, quirky stories about The
Music Man — including that Shirley Jones
was pregnant with her second son, Patrick Cassidy, while she was making it, and
while DaCosta insisted he could cover for her Robert Preston noticed when he
embraced her for their big love scene and the young, as yet unborn Patrick
kicked him in the stomach. (Years later Preston visited a theatre that was
doing a stage revival of The Music Man in which Shirley Jones was playing the mother of her character here —
and Patrick Cassidy was the star.) And of course I couldn’t help but make a few
jokes about the subsequent fates of some of the actors: when Ronny Howard as
Marian’s lisping and much younger
brother Winthrop begged off from a picnic date with Amaryllis (Monique
Vermont), I joked he’d tell her, “I’m going to a picture show — and some day
I’m going to direct them!” And when Marian’s mother was badgering her to get
married, I thought she could have told her, “Actually I had a dream in which I did get married, and had five kids — and then he died
and the kids and I had to start a singing group to make ends meet!” — 6/9/20
