The Music Man

7T6 Trombones 
With A Capital T

The Music Man
Directed by Morton DaCosta
USA 1962 
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone A 

I’d never seen one of my dad’s favourite musicals, The Music Man, before... although, of course, the song 76 Trombones is obviously a musical earworm to this day. Indeed, the film and stage show is such a well known piece that, even though I’d not seen it, I was easily able to recognise that wonderful parody of one of the songs and a character featured in The Simpsons episode about the monorail. 

So I finally saw it and was not only charmed by it... I immediately leapt onto the computer to grab one of the last remaining copies of the movie version soundtrack from that well known website named after a tribe of women who used to cut their own breast off in order to improve their use with a bow and arrow (more coverage of that in a future blog probably never but, I like to throw these little pieces of dubious info in from time to time). I had to source a copy of the film on American Blu Ray because there just seems to be a dearth of the genre available in that format in the UK at the moment. C’mon people... we want more high definition musicals!

Okay... so... adapted from the very long running Broadway smash by Meredith Wilson (and including many more songs which never made it to the stage version but were indeed written for it at one point or another), The Music Man tells the story of Professor Harold Hill... not a professor but, instead, a conman who goes from town to town selling the proposition of a boy band with instruments and music, swindling people out of dollars and keeping his neck out of deep water with a little bit of oomph and pizazz.

Hill is played by Robert Preston, blessed with more than a regular helping of that particular oomph and definitely a large side order of said pizazz, who made the show his own on stage but was nearly passed up for the movie by Warner Brothers, who wanted someone bigger. It apparently took Cary Grant to both refuse the part and furthermore tell Warner Brothers that he wouldn’t even go to see it in cinemas if Preston wasn’t in it, to seal the deal. 

Preston’s love interest, the target of his initially false affections until the con backfires on his emotional wellbeing, is Shirley Jones (pregnant at the time with young Patrick Cassidy, of TV fame) who does a wonderful job. Preston’s friend, in on the con, is Buddy Hackett and, playing Jones’ very young brother, is the then seven year old Ronny Howard. Yep. The same red headed kid who would grow up to star in films like American Graffiti, hang out with The Fonz in Happy Days and, of course, be a major modern film director, still, at time of writing. 

And it’s all just wonderful. Shot in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, the film is very well designed with frames based, as far as I could see, on vertical rectangles in the composition to divide up the screen to highlight elements of the story. Not to mention some wonderful transitions where, towards the end of a scene, everything apart from the principal actors will suddenly fade to pitch black, revealing the artifice of the stagey setting in what I can only describe as a ‘soon to be’ Godardian manner. Although, I guess at that time, it’s probably more akin to Brechtian theatre? Lars Von Trier would cerrtainly know, I suspect. ;-)This technique is also used to softly pull frames out and set them aside each other in a kind of masked split-screen, so songs and their counterpoint can be put together and shown from different scenes simultaneously, at one point. 

And Robert Preston is just amazing in this. What a vibrant personality this guy has, as he fast talks his way out of everything and then makes a little, throw away hand-dusting motion every time he gets over a little hurdle in his con game. Talk about buckets full of charisma. 

And the songs are... well, you always get a couple of duds... but the majority of them are not just great, they’re multilayered with the lyrics doing an abnormally large amount of heavy lifting when it comes to plot exposition, Which sounds bad but it in no way makes them any less charming. On the contrary many of them are very clever and... I’m guessing very hard to learn with some of the dense sets of layers bounding off each other. There must have been an awful lot of rehearsals in this production.

And, yeah, I’m not going to say much more on The Music Man, I’m just going to leave it for you to discover for yourself if you haven’t already, except to say that as much as Meredith Wilson made from this show, the film and the profit percentage... it was actually surpassed by the amount of money he made from The Beatles cover version of ‘Til There Was You from this musical... which is not a song I like but, there you go. But, yeah, give this movie a go because it’s very cool.