Very strangely, Finian's Rainbow is one of two films I need to see before I'm done with all of the movies nominated for Oscars in 1968 (I've seen most films from most years, and I'm close on a lot of them.) But Finian's Rainbow is a musical, and so I should have seen it a long time ago. I think there's a reason I haven't. This is... a weird thing. It's a kind of Brigadoon meets... well, I don't know what it meets. The music feels simultaneously 1960s and 1940s. It's sort of nominally about fighting racist prejudice, but its main song – one that keeps recurring – is about some fantasy version of Ireland. And although this is quite a stagey musical, with a very weird episode of non-musical, non-minstrel blackface involving turning a racist white man Black, this is directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who would, of course, make The Godfather just four years later. Honestly, this felt like it had a lot of cool elements, and the songs were also good, but they felt mashed up oddly in this movie.
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