DVDs: It Happened One Summer
After catching a performance of the recently-opened Broadway smash Oklahoma! in 1943, film producer Daryl F. Zanuck urged Rodgers and Hammerstein to write directly for the screen another piece of musical Americana. Zanuck decided it should be a musical version of Philip Stong's 1932 novel State Fair. The story of the Frake family's journey to the Iowa State Fair had already been filmed as a black-and-white, non-musical film by Fox in 1933, starring Will Rogers and Janet Gaynor. Now the studio would remake it as a color musical, and who better than Rodgers and Hammerstein to do the honors?
The team was deeply into work on Carousel by the time Zanuck came calling. They agreed to do the film with the proviso that they be allowed to do all the writing on the East Coast. The film would be directed by Walter Lang, who would go on to direct the film version of The King and I. Hammerstein's script would be based on the screenplay by Sonia Levien and Paul Green for the '33 film. Levien later co-authored the Oklahoma! screenplay.
The studio wanted a nostalgic piece like Meet Me in St. Louis, and Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1945 film version of State Fair delivered just that. To complement Hammerstein's slight but charming screenplay, the team wrote six songs for the picture. One of them, "It Might as Well Be Spring," won the Academy Award, and two others, "It's a Grand Night for Singing" and "That's for Me," were also popular. "Spring" was performed in the film by Jeanne Crain, the vocal dubbed by Louanne Hogan.
State Fair would remain the only Rodgers and Hammerstein musical written directly for the screen. In 1962, Fox chose to film State Fair for a third time, this time a remake of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical version with one obvious change: The action was moved from Iowa to Texas. With a screenplay by Richard Breen and direction by Jose Ferrer, the new film retained five songs from the '42 version, eliminating only the now-unusable "All I Owe Ioway." But Rodgers, who had lost partner Hammerstein in 1960, wrote both music and lyrics for five new songs: "More Than Just a Friend," "Willing and Eager," "Never Say No to a Man," "It's the Little Things in Texas," and "This Isn't Heaven" the latter actually written for the film of Flower Drum Song.
The film featured several performers Pat Boone, Bobby Darin, Ann-Margret, Pamela Tiffin with youth appeal, while Fox musical veteran Alice Faye came out of a sixteen-year retirement to play the mother. Like Crain in the earlier version, Tiffin's singing was dubbed.
Although it retained the central notion of the first musical film --each member of a family of four journeys to the state fair with a particular goal in mind-- the 1962 picture lost the quaint appeal of the '45 version. Some of this was due to the update; as The New York Times stated, "The rustic charm of a country fair has been superseded by a neon-lit Dallas, as ultra-modern a site as a missile-launching area."
Son Wayne Boone is now out to win a cup for drag racing. Vivian Blaine's '45 band vocalist is now Ann-Margret's steamy midway dancer. And Darin is now a reporter on television. Thanks to the new songs, the film is much more of an integrated, character-song show than the '45 version. But it's also charmless and flat, with several of the leads resistible. The strongest element is Boone, who is more believable as farm boy Wayne Frake than was Dick Haymes in the '45 film. But the new film never provides much of a reason for the necessity of a second remake.
Rodgers and Hammerstein's State Fair had its stage premiere at the St. Louis Municipal Opera in 1969, with TV's Ozzie and Harriet Nelson as the Frake parents and Tommy Tune also in the cast. In 1996, State Fair made it to Broadway for an unsuccessful run of 118 performances. Co-produced by David Merrick, the new version used all six of the '45 songs, one "More Than Just a Friend" of the '62 songs, two cut songs from Oklahoma!, plus songs from Allegro, Me and Juliet, and Pipe Dream.
The show provided a modest amount of pleasant, summer-stock-level entertainment. But there were problems. The '45 film was a slight but appealing atmosphere piece. At 100 minutes, it's light on plot and is best enjoyed as a loving evocation of a wholesome, simple, vanished America. Rodgers and Hammerstein seemed to realize that the source material was too thin to bear the weight of deep musicalization, so most of the songs, with the exception of "It Might as Well Be Spring," were introduced as performance pieces rather than character numbers. The stage show attempted to musicalize its characters with songs written for characters in other works or written as performance songs, and the attempt was only occasionally successful.
The '45 State Fair was previously available on DVD. But the new, sixtieth-anniversary double-DVD release of State Fair includes both the '45 and '62 versions, the latter on DVD for the first time.
The bonus material includes a useful featurette called "From Page, to Screen, to Stage," comparing the three film versions and tracing the history of the property through the Broadway show. Tom Briggs co-author of the Broadway version, Bruce Pomahac its orchestrator, Ted Chapin President of the R&H Organization, and film historian Richard Barrios are the talking heads here. Among the comments offered, it's noted that Rodgers felt there wasn't enough at stake in the story for State Fair to work as a stage musical.
There's an excerpt from the 1954 General Foods TV salute to R&H, a clip of Mary Martin singing "It Might As Well Be Spring." Then there's a fairly unnecessary curiosity, the 1976 pilot for a State Fair TV series, with Vera Miles and Linda Purl among the cast. Although it's about a farm family and there is a fair, this program bears no resemblance to the three films. And the show was clearly youth-oriented, concentrating on son Wayne.
As with the new Oklahoma! DVD, there are two sets of commentary. The '45 version is accompanied by an informative conversation between Briggs and Barrios that includes a comparison of the three films, extensive background on the '45 cast and score, information on the stage version, and much about Fox's musicals and use of technicolor.
Briggs and Barrios perceptively note that while most of the '45 numbers begin presentationally, they gradually become relevant to the characters and situations. It's said that while Rodgers might have been interested in writing genuine character songs for the film, the studio remained shy about them, preferring the standard onstage numbers.
There are also such tidbits as the fact that Alice Faye, the mother in the '62 version, had been intended for the role Vivian Blaine played in '45; that Dana Andrews could sing but was dubbed anyway; that a seventh song, "We Will Be Together," was shot but cut; and that in order to distinguish it from the '65 remake, the '45 film used to be retitled It Happened One Summer for TV airings.
For the '62 film, the audio-commentary track features Pat Boone in fairly inconsequential reminiscences about a film he loves he calls it "one of the last terrific family musicals". Boone stands up for the homespun values promoted in his version of State Fair, while noting that the swine who played prize boar Blue Boy was "a method hog."
With the DVD release of the CinemaScope Oklahoma! and the '62 State Fair, the only Rodgers and Hammerstein film not on DVD is Flower Drum Song. One hopes this omission won't be permanent.