Fox Rainbow Over The Midway
A 1945 State Fair To Celebrate Peace and Technicolor
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posted by John McElwee at 10:13 AM
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
A 1945 State Fair To Celebrate Peace and Technicolor
3 Comments:
Hey, it's a grand night for singing.
Donald Benson considers Rodgers and Hammerstein in the movies:
A quick check shows that, in addition to "State Fair," Fox did nearly all the movie versions of Rodgers and Hammerstein ("Flower Drum Song", a middling hit, went to Universal). Was there some kind of long-term deal, or did Fox go after each property individually, or were R&H simply close with a specific exec or producer?
MGM did get some Rodgers & Hart shows, turning them into vehicles for Mickey & Judy and Nelson & Jeannette. The elephantine "Jumbo" must have some stories behind it. Unnamed but clearly identifiable, it achieved a dubious immortality as the movie Ignatius T. Reilly loves to hate in "Confederacy of Dunces."
Craig Reardon remembers "State Fair" and some of the artists associated with it:
John,
Once again your writing and ability to cover all the salient points inspire me to go to my drawers (where I keep my DVDs) and fish out the 1945 "State Fair" to watch while I eat lunch, here! Fox keeps threatening to release a big Blu-ray box of all their R&H musicals, but so far haven't, so we have to fall upon our DVDs in those instances where certain titles haven't been upgraded to HD yet.
I was taken to see the last (to date) remake in 1962, with blandly-pleasant Pat Boone, and toothsome Ann-Margret. Dour Tom Ewell was the not-particularly-appropriate substitute for Will Rogers and/or Charles Winninger before him. When my family moved to Redondo Beach in 1970, I remember being surprised to spy Tom Ewell out walking his dog many times, always by himself. One time I was not far from where he was near the beach itself and said something innocuous about his dog, in an attempt to make contact. He merely replied, "She's an old dog and she's sick." And, that was it! Alice Faye was of course also welcomed back (if that's not too sentimental for whatever it really was) to Fox for this remake, but the significance of this was totally lost on me at age 9! I remember a pal of mine who knew Ken Darby saying that as he and Alfred Newman worked on this remake, they both bemoaned memories of the '45 version and repeatedly said to themselves, "Let's face it, it isn't 1945 and this isn't 'State Fair' the way we'd prefer to remember it!" It was a chore for them to do the '62 version, in other words, versus the joy the earlier one had been.
My other chance contacts with people involved with the '45 "State Fair" include about three separate "sightings" of Dana Andrews in the '70s at public events (a screening of "Portrait of Jennie" in 1970 which was attended by director William Dieterle, and which Andrews attended no doubt in order to see Dieterle who he'd worked with before; and, two sightings at the L.A. Music Center, where Andrews was seen with his wife, just another patron like me.) I had an indirect connection or contact with Jeanne Crain. It went this way. I worked on a Disney-produced movie called "Hidalgo" in 2002, and one day I was turning a young stunt man into a faux 'Arab' for a sequence being filmed near Dumont Dunes (not far from Las Vegas), and he mentioned his mother had been in the movies. I naturally inquired who, and he said "Jeanne Crain." Well, that was unexpected! I said, oh, well, she was an incredible beauty, and he was proud of her and said, "Well, she's one of the great moms." Ms. Crain passed away shortly thereafter---according to the IMDB, on December 14, 2003.
Truly, those people inhabited a movie world we can only imagine, and those movies still exert a magical quality even to later generations. You're so right that Fox's decision to junk their 3-strip B&W negs for their early Technicolor films was a terrible mistake, but I'd guess they did it to economize on space during their near-oblivion after "Cleopatra". Isn't this likely? That's a subject for separate inquiry, the whole period when as Richard Zanuck said the place was nearly deserted in the mid-'60s. I had the great good luck to be invited by John Chambers to visit the studio in September 1967, by which time the phenomenal success of "Sound of Music" and some TV stuff had sustained Fox. Chambers had joined the studio to supervise the special makeup demands for a film that was still in postproduction at that time, but which, upon release the following year, would vastly enrich Fox's coffers, too: the original hit "Planet of the Apes".
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