I’ve seen this joyfully satirical movie multiple times and can’t get tired of it.
Shirley Jones and Robert Preston are too far apart in age, but they’re both absolutely perfect for their roles otherwise.
And here’s another old movie telling audiences that being smart, educated, and assertive does not make a woman undesirable (though it might make people criticize her). I’ll just try to overlook the movie’s wrong-headed assumption that a woman is more attractive when she takes off her glasses.
Like many older movies, The Music Man is void of diversity in the cast. Unlike many older movies, it takes place in a setting where the lack of diversity is plausible: an all-white small town in northern Iowa in the early 1900s is not so far-fetched. Still, there’s one tiny reference to Tommy (what passes for a bad boy in River City) belonging to those “Nithlanians” living south of town, and this gives a hint that people who are “other” might be excluded from the town proper and exist on the margins. And yet whatever Tommy’s exact background, it’s still European.
The staging of the scene where Tommy puts a firecracker behind Eulalie Shinn seriously needed more work. He walks right up on the floor in front of the entire room, in plain view. Nobody could have missed him planting this little explosive, yet they act surprised and ask who did it. These people aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, but they’re not that stupid. So maybe we’re supposed to assume 99.5% of the town wanted to see this woman blown up (even a little), so they pretended not to notice.
I forever love watching the four school-board members go from being embittered enemies to singing together as a quartet. The start is as simple as “Ice cream!” and it just keeps rolling.
Does the song “Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little” dip into negative stereotypes of women? Well, yes. But the movie is crystal clear that it has in mind a particular sort of woman, and not women in general. Standing in contrast there is obviously Marian; there is also Marian’s mother; there are a score of young women who care far more about dancing than gossiping; there are frequent background women whose faces and movements suggest they are not particularly thrilled with Eulalie Shinn and her close group of elites and may even find them ridiculous. Also the song is a counterpoint to the earlier men’s talk in the “Rock Island Line” sequence, where instead of chickens they talk like a train (“Whattya talk, Whattya talk, Whattya talk?”), and these men are gossiping every bit as much as Eulalie’s band.
Although, yes, interspersing “Pick-a-Little” with footage of actual chickens—twice—was a trifle unnecessary.
Why on earth do they place Amaryllis in the stable to overhear “The Sadder But Wiser Girl”? Out of all the songs in the movie, why this one? Hill is cheering for “lost virtue” and Hester winning another A, and there’s the little girl standing on the edge of the screen by the horses, grinning and listening to every word. Though I suppose in her context she’s already been brow-beaten enough with messages on decent behavior that the lyrics can be a corrective instead of completely warping her views on relations between men and women.
“Marian the Librarian” is my favorite song from The Music Man, but the scene itself isn’t perfect. People really ought to take no for an answer; you shouldn’t turn a library into a dance pit; and you don’t have to toss away your glasses to be fun and lovely.
I wish there’d been a scene showing Prof. Hill and Winthrop spending time together before the Wells Fargo song. You can fill in the blanks, but it would be nice to provide Marian with more on-screen reason to give Hill the credit for Winthrop’s new openness.
No song should ever be called “Shipoopi.” More importantly, no woman should ever be called that. I know that words (and parts of words) change connotations over the years, but was there really a time when calling a woman your “Shipoopi” could actually sound like a positive?
The anvil salesman might’ve had better luck making a lasting change in people’s minds if he hadn’t started out telling them how stupid they were. People have an incentive to go back to their old belief if doing so “proves” they really weren’t stupid.