The Music Man (1962)

I first learned of the Music Man when my brother's fifth grade class put it on. (My brother played Mayor Shinn.) Our entire family learned the train scene, all of the monologues (especially "Trouble"), and the Music Man became part of our lives. I still remember most of those monologues, and I still love to watch Robert Preston and Shirley Jones create their magic and make their music. Like "My Fair Lady," the players have refined their parts to high art, but have not burned out; the details delight again and again. The chorus is the best I've heard (Wells Fargo Wagon), the cast is just great. When my older son was two years old, The Music Man was his favorite video; he watched it over and over, laughing and gurgling. He "outgrew" it, and is now almost ten. Last night we watched it (again): I, my wife, and both of our sons. It touched me as much as the first time I saw it. ("I always think there's a band, kid.") I hear and read criticism of Robert Preston's acting, that as a performer he is a dilettante. But I feel this criticism misses the point. Harold Hill is the dilettante, trying to pass himself off as a music expert--until he gets his foot caught in the door. Preston is perfect as Hill. I love this film, and will watch it with my loved ones for a long, long time to come.

Fmovies: One of the best musicals ever made. So much of the movie is perfect: plot, music, most of the cast. One weak spot is Susan Luckey as Zaneeta, though the part is not well written. Another is Monique Vermont as Amaryllis, worse than average for a child actor. But the 8-year-old Ronny Howard as Winthrop is excellent. He shines at the end when Harold Hill gets his foot caught in the door. Of course, Preston is perfect, as is Shirley Jones, who never looked better. (Someone said Heaven is where all the men are 33 and all the women are 30. Jones was in her late 20s.) Paul Ford, Hermione Gingold (overdoing it once), and Pert Kelton are all outstanding.

The director Morton DaCosta uses a gimmick here and in Auntie Mame that I don't care for. At the end of some scenes, all the lights go out except those on the principals. Sometimes that's more of a jolt than necessary, because we've gone from outdoors to inside the studio.

My favorite song is Sadder But Wiser Girl. The reference to Hester winning just one more A meant nothing until 11th grade when we read The Scarlet Letter. And after Preston sings that line, he looks guiltily over his shoulder at Amaryllis to see if she understands how naughty he's been.

My second favorite is Lida Rose/Will I Ever Tell You. Such a beautiful song. It pains me that the rocking chairs at either end of the screen are sometimes out of sync. It should have been done perfectly.

One brilliant touch concerns the Buffalo Bills. Early on, Mayor Shinn says "The members of the School Board will not present a patriotic tableau. Some disagreement about costumes, I suppose." At the time, the four are dressed quite differently. As their singing progresses, they start dressing more and more alike, until at the end they're dressed alike (I'm pretty sure).

Marion's epiphany during The Wells Fargo Wagon is quite sweet.

As is a lovely line from Goodnight, My Someone: But I must depend on a wish and a star/ As long as my heart doesn't know who you are. (Sigh.)

This was a very difficult musical, I suspect, for Morton da Costa to direct. To his great credit, it never looks to me like a stage musical; taking his cue from a few famous examples of adaptations done on non-musical films, he has used the entire River City, Iowa, USA town as his stage, moving his mobile cameras wherever the action could best be served. But I suggest "The Music Man" is most important not for its entertainment qualities, which are considerable perhaps, but for its importance as a fantasy-for-the-sake-of-an-idea plot. Without it, we might never have had "Finian's Rainbow", "Chicago" or "City of Angels" for instance. Hollywood's studio tsars, despite their surrealized applying of pseudo-Christian endings to plots, were always very cautious about introducing any "fantasy" element into a film. (Note the lengthy apologia by David Selznick for "Portrait of Jenny", for instance.) In this story, Meredith Wilson used his personal knowledge of the people and ways-of-thinking of Iowa to ground a charming and genial fantasy about music-course salesman Harold Hill firmly within its milieu--one of a group of U.S minds in need of more imagination. The town's kindly folk, in fact, are shown as barely tolerant toward its librarian, who inherited the institution from its elderly compiler; they are suspicious of how Marian Paroo acquired the stock, and suspicious of her desire to teach their young minds to think for themselves. Enter Professor Hill--to change the lives of the almost charming but repressed early twentieth-century denizens forever. The basic plot is very simple to state. Professor Hill comes to towns, sells the town's citizens on the idea of starting a boy's band, and then skips out before they can ever perform. Here, he is brought to the point of leading his troops, trained by his "think system", in a concert; and the townsfolk are enthralled by hearing their sons play. This simple tale starred Robert Preston as the wily city-bred Hill, Shirley

Jones as the lovely but doubting 'Marian the Librarian', Pert Kelton as her mother, Buddy Hackett as his fine friend, Paul Ford and Hermione Gingold as the pretentious Mayor and his wife, plus many citizens of the town young and old, Harry Hickox as the envious rival who exposes Hill and the Buffalo Bills singing quartet. Well-known songs in this sprightly US romp include, "Till There Was You", "Somethin' Special", "Goodnight My Someone", "Marian the Librarian" and "Trouble", among others. In the film, the leads are award caliber, everyone else from Ronnie Howard to Susan Luckey to the quartet do very well. Marion Hargrove adapted Wilson's libretto and songs written by Wilson and Franklin Lacey. The cinematography by Robert Burks was vivid and stylishly old-fashioned. Paul Groesse did the art direction, with set decorations being supplied by George James Hopkins and his staff. The very elaborate costumes were the work of the brilliant designer Dorothy Jeakins. This is a sense of life film written by, about and for non-practicing Christians of the last century that was mounted somehow in 1962, as an homage to a simpler and more optimistic time. We can all be grateful it was; it is a great deal of fun and its ending is a happy part of the fantasy, which needs to be seen to be appreciated.

The Music Man fmovies. It seems redundant to add my comments when so many people have already done justice to it, but I'm still in the glow of having finally seen this movie as God intended--in Cinemascope! When I saw it long ago on TV, I was struck by how unusual it was but kept noticing certain distracting bits around the edge of the screen--it was the fade-outs and split-screen effects I was missing! Watch this film in letterboxed form ONLY please--it's visually, musically and dramatically innovative.

Its splendors have already been mentioned. I add two minor treats: 1) appearance of lanky character actor Hank Worden (of "The Searchers" and "Twin Peaks") as the undertaker, and 2) script so full of bizarre slang and expressions, it's as if P.G. Wodehouse or Damon Runyan were writing turn-of-the-century Americana.

My two carps are minor: I would have told Morton Da Costa to lose all the heavy-handed cutaways to the train wheels ("Rock Island") and chickens ("Pick a Little, Talk a Little") because we already got the point, and Ron Howard's cute lithp is a turn-off for me, but I never like cute kids. However, he's good at the climax, and when Shirley Jones hears him singing "Wells Fargo Wagon" and tears the evidence against Harold Hill out of the book (a librarian!), it's one of the most convincing turnarounds in musical history. Especially because she's still not fooled by the hucksterism, she just perceives it differently in comparison with the easily manipulated small-towners around her. She realizes that he's selling hope and joy despite himself ("There's always a band.") And when she just thanks him for his gift ("Till There Was You") and doesn't mind if he flees, of course he realizes he would be insane to leave. Another heartfelt turnaround.

One of the most graceful musicals, marked by blurring of the line between straight dialogue and songs--as the line "there was love all around but I never heard it singing" implies, you can hear the singing if you listen for it in the world. It's in the trains and the chickens and the bands you hear in your head and the pride in your children playing that clarinet by the "think system." Moving.

Just watched the movie for the xxth time—it has gotten to be a 4th of July tradition. I was first exposed to this musical when my older sisters were cast in a high school theatrical version back before this movie was released.

What's not to like? Preston is brilliant. Jones is the perfect example of how the perfection of human beauty is enhanced with a beautiful voice. It's romantic and nostalgic and wonderful.

But what makes Music Man so special is that it is based on a cultural reality. Iowa (like the rest of the Big Ten turf) is awash in an incredible band music tradition. Those amazing bands that play halftime music at Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio State don't fall out of thin air—they are supported by a feeder system. Music Man was supposedly about Mason City and I would be shocked if they don't have a first-rate high school band to this day.

But all these bands had to start somewhere. Someone had to convince folks that they should spend money to teach their children to make music. Now it is unlikely that someone as smooth-talking as Hill ever existed, but someone had to perform the job he did. And anyone who was promoting a band was very likely to be something of a showman—it comes with the territory. So while Hill was an exaggeration, real Hills existed.

Note here, this isn't a story of a con-man who got away with one. Because it doesn't matter if Hill knew a note of music. If this had really happened, there would be no downside. Suddenly, the town would have a bunch of new instruments and in love with the idea their town could make it's own music. The town probably had enough Marions so they could get basic instruction started. Besides, it would take at least five years before the town band could make music anyway, so no one could have expected Hill to actually form a boy's band during the summer. Guys like Hill were important but hardly sufficient. The great youth bands in Iowa would wait until her universities started cranking out qualified music teachers.

The idea that Iowa could have developed from virgin grassland to a society with roads, schools, and a successful export economy in only 60 years (1850 to 1910 when this musical was supposedly set) implies a LOT of plain hard work. It is also implies promoters. And the guys who brought music to the Midwest were the sort of people who didn't wait for permission to get something started. It's why the sensible librarian / piano teacher Marion recognized the promoter's value to the community.

There's a lot of truth in this wonderful, silly, beautiful movie.

bright, fun, colorful, unforgettable songs, likeable characters, great choreography, true to the time period, and i'd like to see anyone try to find an actor blend so naturally into a character as robert preston.