General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

April Love

April Love is a 1957 American musical romance film directed by Henry Levin for Twentieth Century-Fox, starring the singers Pat Boone and Shirley Jones as a Chicago youth sent to a Kentucky horse farm and the neighboring girl he falls for there.¹ It is a musical remake of Fox's Home in Indiana (1944), adapted by Winston Miller from a novel by George Agnew Chamberlain, and it is remembered chiefly for its title song, which topped the American singles chart and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song.²

Key fact	Detail
Release	New York opening 27 November 1957, as a Thanksgiving release; runtime about 97–99 minutes¹^•³
Source	George Agnew Chamberlain's novel, first serialized in The Saturday Evening Post 18 October–8 November 1941; previously filmed by Fox as Home in Indiana¹
Principal cast	Pat Boone (Nick Conover), Shirley Jones (Liz Templeton), Dolores Michaels (Fran Templeton), Arthur O'Connell (Jed Bruce), Jeanette Nolan (Henrietta Bruce)³
Title song	Music by Sammy Fain, lyrics by Paul Francis Webster; No. 1 on the Billboard chart for two weeks from 23 December 1957; nominated for the 1957 Academy Award for Best Music, Original Song⁴^•⁵
Sales	Boone's recording of "April Love" sold a million copies, and the soundtrack album spent three months in the charts⁶
Format	CinemaScope, De Luxe color, Westrex recording system; exteriors shot on location in Lexington, Kentucky¹

Spoilers

Plot

Nick Conover, a callous Chicago youth, is on probation for taking a car without permission, and his mother sends him to her sister Henrietta Bruce and her husband Jed at their Kentucky horse ranch.¹ Sullen and resentful, Nick clashes with Jed, who has grown distant and irritable since the death of his son Jed Junior in the Korean War; after that loss the couple let their horse farm run down and gave up racing.¹^•⁷

Nick soon meets the neighboring Templeton family: the tomboyish Liz, who loves the outdoors and horses, and her sister Fran, who prefers glamour and fast cars. Liz is drawn to Nick, while Nick is at first drawn to Fran.⁷ Nick, who arrives hating horses, discovers a way with them, particularly with an ornery horse that trusts no one, and becomes involved in harness racing, culminating in a sulky (light two-wheeled cart used in harness racing) race.⁷^•³

Production

Fox green-lit the film for Pat Boone, then almost 23 years old and already a chart-topping singer, on the strength of the rushes from his first film, Bernardine (1957), before that picture had finished shooting. Boone recalled the script as "tailor-made" for him, in the mold he associated with Bing Crosby.² Shirley Jones, also 23, was more experienced, having starred in the Fox musicals Oklahoma! (1955) and Carousel (1956); she feared being pigeonholed in musicals and later described the role as the studio's way of consoling her for the dramatic parts she was being refused.² Despite her billing, Jones does not get a solo number in the film; she sings a reprise of "Give Me a Gentle Girl."⁸

Location work. According to production notes in the AMPAS Library file on the film, exteriors were filmed on location in Lexington, Kentucky, with Crown Crest Farm outside Lexington serving as the Templeton Ranch, and the county fair chorus made up of Lexington citizens. The normally green fields were dyed yellow to match the "Clover in the Meadow" lyric "sky of blue, field of yeller."¹ Both Boone and Jones learned to drive a sulky for the film, according to Jones on the Twilight Time DVD commentary.⁷

The near-kiss

The film's best-known production story concerns a Ferris wheel scene in which Boone was supposed to kiss Jones. An August 1957 news item reported that Boone initially refused the kissing scenes because his religion forbade physical contact with any woman other than his wife, though he eventually relented.¹ In a 2010 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Boone gave a more detailed account: the kiss was not in the script but was ordered on the day of shooting by director Henry Levin. Boone asked for a day's delay to consult his wife, who agreed on the condition that he "won't enjoy it that much." By then the story had leaked with religious reasons cited, so Boone refused after all, and Levin solved the scene by having a taunting bystander interrupt the kiss at the last moment. The studio kept the resolution secret as a publicity angle, telling audiences they would have to see the film to learn how "the kiss" was resolved.² In the finished film Nick never kisses Liz at all.⁸

The title song

Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster, Academy Award winners for "Secret Love" and "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing," wrote "April Love" for Boone.⁴ Boone doubted the slow ballad could compete in the heyday of rock and roll and had arranger Billy Vaughn add an introduction to give it weight; he composed the song's opening ten notes himself at the session.⁴ The single entered the chart on 4 November 1957, one month after Boone's ABC-TV series The Pat Boone-Chevy Showroom premiered, and reached No. 1 for two weeks from 23 December 1957, beating Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers, and Buddy Holly for the top spot.⁴ It was Boone's fifth number-one single and, for the first time, an original song rather than a cover.⁹ The song was nominated for the 1957 Academy Award for Best Music, Original Song, losing to "All the Way" from The Joker Is Wild.⁵^•¹⁰ The soundtrack album on Dot Records reached 12th position on the US album charts, and the film's score also included instrumental music by Alfred Newman and Cyril J. Mockridge.¹¹^•¹²

Reception and afterlife

Contemporary and later critics treated the film as pleasant but slight. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that it offered "two of the nicest-looking young singers to be found anywhere, a batch of pleasant tunes, some nifty Kentucky scenery in good color and absolutely no plot."⁷ The film's popularity was boosted by the title song, which was already a hit when the picture opened.¹³ Boone followed it with roles in Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), State Fair (1962), Goodbye Charlie (1964), and The Cross and the Switchblade (1970).⁸ The film was released on DVD in 2013 and on Blu-ray by Twilight Time, with a commentary track featuring Shirley Jones.³^•¹⁴

One dating discrepancy runs through the sources: the AFI Catalog's history section says Chamberlain's novel was previously filmed by Fox "in 1941" as Home in Indiana, while TCM, Rotten Tomatoes, and other accounts date that film to 1944.¹^•²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Musical and music films (individual works) › Musical films of the 1930s to 1960s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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