G | 2h 21min | Family, Fantasy, Musical | 9 October 1968 | Color, ws
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Stars: Fred Astaire, Petula Clark, Tommy Steele, Don Francks, Keenan Wynn, Al Freeman Jr., Dolph Sweet.
Hermes Pan ... choreographer
12 songs in the Soundtracks, some oft repeated. Favorites: Old Devil Moon, Look To The Rainbow / How Are Things In Glocca Morra?
Great to have Petula Clark singing/acting on film. This is her 24th of 26 film acting credits. She says in a featurette this is her first American film; she does another next year. She has a beautiful voice and face.
This is the only soundtrack credit for Don Francks, which is a shame, since he sings well for film. Not a big B'way style, but an intimate film style.
Last dance film for FA; he does 5 more films through '81. His prior dance film was Silk Stockings ('57).
I love the anti-racism aspect of the film, particularly the simple fact that Al Freeman plays a botanist working on his Master's degree. The more obvious plot thread is that Keenan Wynn gets turned into a black man by a wish on the pot of gold. Unfortunately, he doesn't really learn from it, he gets a spell cast on him to make him accept the situation.
The disc includes a c.track with dir. Coppola. The menu calls it "Watching the film with Francis Coppola", which is more apt than calling it a c.track. He's just free-associating while watching, and repeats himself a lot. I remember that somewhere FA's feet get cut off (but I didn't see it today), and he explains that it was the duping, blowing the image up to 70mm, that caused that to happen. But his repetition involves wanting to have cut the script to make the film shorter. Also, apparently he fired Hermes Pan halfway through, and staged (big movement) quite a bit himself. He mentioned another choreographer for any actual dance steps, but was rather uncertain about the name, so I didn't jump on it.
The thing he laments most frequently is that in this, his first non-academic film, he though his job was staging and camera placement, but that he should have been concentrating on how to make the story move along and make the characters/story more vivid. Apparently film school wasn't too good yet, because he did graduate with a degree in film, but they didn't teach him that. He also had nothing to do with the editing of the film; when filming was done he moved on to his next project.
Warner, dir. Coppola; 7+
