State Fair (1945)

Our Ohio State Fair is a great state fair. During the gloomy winter months (like now), I can picture our own state fair beginning next July (only 7 months away!) and think of this movie at the same time. I like this movie better than the 1962 version, because I feel that this 1945 version is warmer, homier and more nostalgic than the later version. Blue Boy is the star. He is a main reason for going. So is mother's canned pickle. The drunk judge is hilarious. Winninger and Bainter fabulous. "Grand Night for Singing". In my childhood, there were the Silver Airplanes (I called them that) in an amusement park. I think they were really early spaceship models. I love this song. Fifteen seconds of Dana Andrews and Jeanne Crain (dubbing?) singing this song in those silver airplanes have forever melted in my memory ever since I first saw them in this movie. The other characters sing verses of this song, but IMO Dana's and Jeanne's part is way more memorable. I like the singing hayseed red-bearded Ioway men. This is also a memorable scene, and to this day I still find it snappy and memorable -- also not too hokey (or hokey-pokey, as S.Z. Sakall would say). Coloration still excellent. Costumes and hair colors show up very well. Movie a little draggy in places, however. I still give it high marks. 9/10.

This wonderful film of 1945 gave us the Oscar winning song "It Might As Well Be Spring," written so beautifully by Rodgers and Hammerstein and sung utterly well by Jeanne Crain, our film's heroine.Basically, a story of rural life with the annual state fair in the urban locale, the picture provided some very comical time for our pigs Esmeralda and Blue Boy. We have love blossoming between the animals as a backdrop to the love by the Crain character and Dana Andrews, a reporter at the fair. While I loved the film, let's not kid ourselves. Andrews were terribly miscast. Musicals were not his forte. The following year he gave a superlative performance in the Oscar-winning "The Best Years of Our Lives," and was Oscar ignored.Faye Bainter and Pa Kettle's Percy Kilbride gave ample support in this delightful film.You'll know that spring has sprung when you see this endearing film.

I've no doubt that on the strength of the blockbuster hit that Richard Rodgers&Oscar Hammerstein had with Oklahoma which was still running on Broadway as this film was being made, that Darryl F. Zanuck offered the team the chance to contribute the songs for a remake of State Fair. Oklahoma in fact was a rural setting and so was Iowa for this second telling of the adventures of the Frake family at the Iowa State Fair.What today's audiences don't appreciate was that in 1946 the Iowa state centennial was being celebrated. Some bright individual at 20th Century Fox must have realized that and a nice musical technicolor remake of the Will Rogers classic State Fair would be a can't miss at the box office. Providing of course Mr. Zanuck could assemble the talent.Though the 1933 cast boasted people like Louise Dresser, Lew Ayres, and Janet Gaynor in support of Will Rogers, the accent there was very much on Rogers as it was HIS picture. Here the accent is on the younger generation. Charles Winninger and Fay Bainter play the older Frakes taking their prize hog, Bainter's mince pie, and children Dick Haymes and Jeanne Crain to the Iowa State Fair. Haymes and Crain, together with Dana Andrews and Vivian Blaine as the respective romantic partners carry the film here.Rodgers and Hammerstein had a lot on their plate back in the day. Besides Oklahoma, Hammerstein was involved in creating a musical version of Bizet's Carmen which became Carmen Jones as we all know. He and Rodgers had another musical open in 1945 that was Carousel and became another American classic. When 20th Century Fox signed them for State Fair, according to a recent biography of Dick Rodgers, they never went west. Rodgers did his music from his estate in Connecticut and Hammerstein wrote the lyrics from his Doylestown, Pennsylvania farm. I guess they met in New York and express mailed the songs to Zanuck in Hollywood.They put together a real nice score, one song It Might As Well Be Spring won the Oscar for Best Original Song from a film. The rest of the score ain't too shabby either with Isn't It Kind of Fun and That's For Me also sung beautifully. My favorite however is It's a Grand Night for Singing, a song so absolutely infectious you will be singing it yourself for days after watching State Fair.Andrews and Crain were dubbed by other singers, but Dick Haymes and Vivian Blaine were seasoned musical performers. Haymes recorded all four of the songs above in an album for Decca that sold very well. Haymes had a smooth, but strong baritone and if scandal hadn't blown his career up a few years later, who knows to what heights he might have risen.Every version of State Fair has something to recommend it. There was even a pilot done in the middle Seventies for a television series based on the time honored Frake family saga. For me however this one cops the prize.

Shown tonight on the Turner Classic Film Network, the 1945 version (second of three versions) is the one that most viewers feel is the best of the versions. It happens to be the first musical version (Will Rogers version was actually just a straight film), and is better than the 1962 version with Bobby Darin and Alice Faye. It is a nice score with two (possibly three) standards: "It Might As Well Be Spring", "It's a Grand Night For Singing", and the title song of "State Fair". But there are actually about seven numbers, and they include a ballad sung by Viviane Blaine, and a duet Blaine sings with Dick Haymes (a later song, somewhat reminiscent of "Oklahoma" but about "Iowa" had Charles Winninger, Faye Bainter, and even Donald Meek sing with Blaine and William Marshall). Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein were at the beginning of their fantastic Broadway musical career, OKLAHOMA having first been produced in 1943. Most people do not realize this but Oscar Hammerstein was more than just a lyricist (like his predecessor with Rodgers, Lorenz Hart), but also wrote the scripts for the shows. This was to help insure that the songs pushed the story along. Rodgers had long wanted to integrate music and dialog. In the early 1930s, when he and Hart came to Hollywood and worked at Paramount, they had whole sequences in their best work (HALLALUJAH, I'M A BUM, LOVE ME TONIGHT, THE PHANTOM PRESIDENT) that did just that. But this was the total script, not just sections of singing dialog.It is late August 1945, and the Frake family are preparing to attend the Iowa State Fair. The father (Winninger) has been grooming his great boar "Blue Bell" for the best boar prize, and the mother (Bainter) has been grooming her sweet and sour pickles and her mince meat for the best prizes. Their son (Dick Haymes) is determined to get back at a crooked barker at the fair (Harry - then Henry - Morgan), besides enjoying it with his girlfriend. But she can't attend, due to her mother's illness. The Frake daughter (Jeanne Crain) has a boring boy-friend, a future farmer who wants to build a modernistic farm (Crain tries to be interested but isn't). Winninger is quite happy to be going, but his friend and feed merchant (Percy Kilbride - who also does a little singing at the start of the film) is a "Gloomy Gus" type, and insists that there may be serious problems ahead. He and Winninger set up a bet (of $5.00 - but this film is set in 1945 after all!) to see if it really turns out to be a totally happy experience for the four members of the family.The family goes off, and we watch the results of the weekend. This includes the two romances that occur between Haymes and a singer at the fair (Blaine) and Crain with a reporter (Dana Andrews). We watch these adventures, and how the romances bloom, as well as how the parents do with their contests.Among other things we see Donald Meek as a contest judge who gets the D.T.s and enjoys it. We see Frank McHugh as a song plugger, who turns out to be a decent fellow. We see how Blaine teaches Morgan a lesson. We learn that even big fat boars like "Blue Bell" have sex drives. And we see if Winninger or Kilbride will win that $5.00.The cast given on this thread is not complete. John Dehner has a small role as a contest announcer, and Emory Parnell is a Congressman addressing the state fair, and Will Wright is one of the judges at the boar contest. The film is a feel good film - a worthy cinematic follow-up to OKLAHOMA, and worthy of preceding the next stage musical triumph CAROUSEL. As such it is fully deserving of the 10 out of 10 I have given it.