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An allegory of the end of the studio system, couched in archaic-modernist mementos right down to Keenan Wynn's resemblance to Jack Warner. The satirical Broadway utopia is reproduced amid "festering tides of radicalism," Fred Astaire (MGM's arthritic gallantry) and Petula Clark (the link to I Know Where I'm Going!) materialize on rolling green hills quickly revealed as the Deep South of "the idle poor and the idle rich." The popular-front backwater has sharecroppers, guitarists and mute naïfs scampering to Hermes Pan choreography while the bigoted senator cries for mint julep. "You've seen The Birth of a Nation, haven't you?" Pushing the whimsy meter to nuclear levels, in prances Tommy Steele, whose leprechauny razzmatazz is perhaps modeled on Mickey Rooney's Puck. "How are things in Glocca Morra?" "Alas, alack and willy-wally." The surreal transmutation suggests Uncle Remus teleported to the year of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, or at least Francis Ford Coppola the New Wave upstart scrambling to blow the dust from the old Warner Brothers lot. As the galvanic twitch of a moribund genre, it's passably spirited: The musical numbers display a close study of Donen and Walters, and Coppola eagerly tries to shatter the proscenium with jump-cuts, ascending cranes and floating cameras. It's as souvenirs of awkward cinematic transition, however, that its folkloric talismans—a pot of gold buried in Astroturf grass, a homegrown cig that won't burn, a wedding held in the charred carcass of a barn—become fascinating. An experiment that finds its completion in One from the Heart, and a refrain ("Follow the fellow who follows the dream...") for the filmmaker to apply to the Mafia, Vietnam, and the roller-coaster of his own career. With Don Francks, Barbara Hancock, Al Freeman Jr., Ronald Colby, and Dolph Sweet.
--- Fernando F. Croce |