General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202612 min read

Finian's Rainbow

Finian's Rainbow is a 1947 American stage musical with music by Burton Lane and lyrics and book by E. Y. "Yip" Harburg and Fred Saidy, and a 1968 film adaptation directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The story sends an Irishman, Finian McLonergan, and his daughter Sharon to the fictional town of Rainbow Valley in the state of "Missitucky", where a stolen leprechaun's pot of gold, a bigoted Southern senator, and a multiracial sharecropper community collide in a blend of fantasy and social satire.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Stage premiere	Broadway, 1947; music by Burton Lane, lyrics by E. Y. Harburg, book by Harburg and Fred Saidy¹
Film release	9 October 1968, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts; directed by Francis Ford Coppola, produced by Joseph Landon³
Film cast	Fred Astaire (Finian), Petula Clark (Sharon), Tommy Steele (Og), Keenan Wynn (Senator Billboard Rawkins), Don Francks (Woody Mahoney), Al Freeman Jr. (Howard), Barbara Hancock (Susan the Silent)⁴
Runtime and rating	145 minutes (AFI); rated G; filmed in 35mm Panavision and blown up to 70mm for roadshow engagements³^•⁵
Budget	Cited as $4 million in the 28 September 1966 New York Times; Variety's review said the final film came in under $4 million³
Reception	Metascore 59 (mixed or average); Tomatometer 47% from 19 reviews⁶^•⁴
Standards	"Look to the Rainbow", "Old Devil Moon", and "How Are Things in Glocca Morra" became standards after the 1947 premiere⁷

Spoilers

Plot

Missitucky, somewhere in the American South, around 1947. Finian McLonergan (Fred Astaire) arrives from Ireland with his daughter Sharon (Petula Clark), lugging a crock of gold he lifted from the leprechauns of Glocca Morra. His plan is pure immigrant optimism with a fairy-tale twist: bury the gold in American soil, and since everything in America grows, the gold will grow too. He picks a spot in Rainbow Valley, a sharecroppers' co-operative near Fort Knox, and puts the crock in the ground¹⁸.

The valley belongs to Woody Mahoney (Don Francks), a laconic tobacco farmer working with a Black scientist, Howard, to develop a new mint-flavored tobacco plant. Woody's sister Susan (Barbara Hancock) is mute and speaks through dance. Sharon falls for Woody almost on contact; the two duet on "Old Devil Moon" in the moonlit fields, and the engagement is on. What Woody does not know is that the strange old Irishman's buried crock has made the whole valley wish-granting territory.

The threat to all this is Senator Billboard Rawkins (Keenan Wynn), a drawling, corrupt, openly racist politician who wants the sharecroppers' land on the cheap and does not bother hiding his contempt for the Black families in the co-operative. Meanwhile, the crock's rightful owner shows up: Og (Tommy Steele), a leprechaun who has followed the McLonergans across the Atlantic, because without his gold he is doomed to turn mortal¹⁹. Og is a comic whirlwind who falls hard for Susan the moment he sees her, and the longer he stays among humans, the more human he becomes.

The gold starts doing its work, and the work is mischievous. When Sharon wishes Susan could speak, the wish takes the girl's voice instead of giving it. Every wish in the valley carries a reversal, and the film's engine is watching each character grab for magic and pay for it.

The film's most notorious sequence is the wish that turns the senator Black. Rawkins, sneering at the sharecroppers and refusing their pleas, declares that they would not know what to do with wealth if they had it, and that if he were in their position he would handle it fine. Sharon, furious, wishes he could wake up in their shoes and understand what their life is like, and the buried gold grants it literally: Rawkins wakes up a Black man, stripped of his memory and, with it, his prejudice¹⁸. Coppola stages the transformation with the film's most pointed staging, cutting between the senator's rant and the silent, listening faces of the people he is insulting, then letting the magic land as a slap. The newly Black, memory-less Rawkins is taken in by the very community he was robbing, and in the film's funniest stretch he ends up working as a butler alongside a sharp-tongued valet (Al Freeman Jr.), who milks the situation for every ounce of comedy while delivering him a Bromo; the sequence is perfectly framed by Coppola and is one of the funniest in all of musical film²⁰.

But the magic cannot hold. Geologists detect gold in the valley, which hands Rawkins exactly the pretext he needs to renew his grab for Woody's land¹⁹. Sharon, blamed for the valley's sorceries, is arrested at her own wedding and sentenced to be burned as a witch¹⁸. Woody and Sharon are dragged to a barn to be torched, and the fairy tale has to pay off or the co-operative loses everything.

The rescue comes from Og, of all people. The leprechaun has been courting Susan in dance, and after a passionate kiss from her he makes his choice: love and mortality over gold and immortality²¹. He spends his last wish turning Rawkins white again, which undoes the senator's pretext, frees Sharon and Woody from the burning barn, and leaves the gold powerless. The land dispute dissolves not through magic but through the senator's own greed collapsing on him, and the community keeps its valley. Finian, his scheme having multiplied nothing but trouble, departs Rainbow Valley with a reprise of "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?" as his farewell.

Characters

Finian McLonergan (Fred Astaire) is a shrewd, charming Irish rogue with gold fever and a touch of homesickness, played by Astaire at nearly seventy in his last musical lead, with no attempt made to disguise his age¹⁴.

Sharon McLonergan (Petula Clark) is his daughter, the film's romantic and moral center, whose wishes drive both the love story and the catastrophe. The English pop star was a fresh addition to the movies, with a singing voice as distinctive as Streisand's¹⁴.

Og (Tommy Steele) is the leprechaun chasing his stolen gold, a mugging, brogue-slinging comic wildcard who slowly turns human and falls for Susan.

Woody Mahoney (Don Francks) is the laconic, singing tobacco farmer who loves Sharon and fights for the co-operative's land.

Susan Mahoney (Barbara Hancock) is Woody's mute sister, who speaks entirely through dance and becomes the object of Og's affections.

Senator Billboard Rawkins (Keenan Wynn) is the bigoted, land-grabbing villain whose magical comeuppance is the film's centerpiece.

Howard (Al Freeman Jr.) is the Black scientist developing the mint tobacco plant, and the valet in the film's funniest scene.

Interpretations and controversies

The Rawkins transformation has always been the film's lightning rod. The 1947 stage show was praised for putting an anti-racist argument inside a Broadway fairy tale, but on screen the device of a white actor in darkened makeup occupying the story's central racial argument reads uncomfortably to modern viewers, even though the film's sympathies are pointedly on the sharecroppers' side. Critics have also noted that the movie's mix of leprechaun fantasy and social commentary never fully coalesces⁵, and one retrospective judged the whole thing predictable, with Steele overacting and Clark oddly detached²².

Sequels, prequels, and universe

None. The film is the only screen adaptation of the 1947 Broadway musical, though a well-received 2009 Broadway revival with new arrangements followed decades later.

The stage musical

The show opened on Broadway in 1947 and was, by one account, one of the most successful Broadway musicals of the 1940s.¹^•⁸ Its authors called it "a musical satire".⁹ The plot pits the Irish newcomers against a crooked, bigoted senator, a credit crisis, and a leprechaun, Og, who must recover his gold before losing it turns him permanently human. Sharon accidentally turns the senator black by making a wish near the magic crock, and the show pairs this fantasy with a love story between Sharon and local farmer Woody Mahoney, and a second romance between Woody's mute sister Susan the Silent and Og.²

The political content was pointed. A doctoral study of the show describes it as condemning established capitalist principles while endorsing socialism, with the capitalist senator humiliated and the Rainbow Valley citizens upheld; the same study notes that the melodramatic device became "increasingly stale" in later revivals, and that a 2009 production was immediately considered dated despite efforts to eliminate blackface.¹⁰ A Harvard Crimson review of a 1966 college production judged that time had faded the show's fantasy, humor, and message, while its music remained "appealing, exciting, frequently lovely" and Harburg's lyrics "far better than the dialogue".¹¹

The aborted animated film

Hollywood's first serious attempt to film the musical was an animated version. Ex-Disney animator John Hubley was hired and created more than 400 storyboard sketches, designs, and character drafts; by 1954, ten key songs had been recorded by leading artists including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong, with Sinatra assigned a part in nearly all the songs to make the project as commercial as possible. A new prologue was added and changes were made to soften the show's vigorous political message, but for a mixture of political and financial reasons the production was abruptly closed down. The chapter attributes the project's difficulties partly to the blacklisting of lyricist E. Y. Harburg in 1951.⁸ An earlier deal had seen the Feldman Company pay a reported $300,000 for the screen rights in the late 1940s, and the search for a producer continued through the 1950s and 1960s.¹⁰

Empire's retrospective adds context for the long delay: Hollywood had little faith in a project whose acerbic social commentary risked trouble with the Production Code, and whose depiction of a senator changing color and of black and white sharecroppers mingling would have been too much for Southern audiences, for whom screen musicals were often stripped of their African-American performers.¹²

The 1968 film

In fall 1966, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts acquired the screen rights from Rainbow Co. for a reported $200,000 plus fifteen percent of net profits once the studio recouped 2.6 times the negative cost. Fred Astaire was cast in the leading role at the same time, and producer Joseph Landon collaborated on the script.¹ According to Turner Classic Movies, the film was rushed into production at Warner Brothers' behest to capitalize on the recent success of The Sound of Music (1965).¹³ Principal photography began 26 June 1967, and the film opened in New York on 9 October 1968, with a Los Angeles black-tie premiere on 16 October to raise funds for the educational television network KCET.¹

The film follows the stage story: Finian buries the stolen gold near Fort Knox believing it will multiply, Senator Rawkins tries to foreclose on Woody's tobacco land, Sharon's wish turns Rawkins black, and Og spends his three magic wishes to save her, restore the senator, and give Susan the power of speech before becoming mortal himself.¹ The promotional campaign, estimated at between $2 and $5 million, emphasized the music, the cast, the "happiness factor" of a family film, and the "now factor" of its social theme, "Negroes in the South".¹

Astaire's last musical. The film is notable as the last screen musical of Fred Astaire, then 69, who plays the wizened Finian with songs and dances the original stage Finian did not have.¹³^•¹⁴ Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times in October 1968, called it "the best of the recent roadshow musicals, perhaps because it's the first to cope successfully with the longer roadshow form", and "the best-directed musical since West Side Story" despite being only Coppola's second film; he praised Astaire's characterization and called Petula Clark "a fresh addition to the movies".¹⁴

The 70mm conversion. The film was shot in 35mm Panavision, often with shallow-focus compositions, and blown up to 70mm for roadshow engagements. Some reviewers criticized the blow-ups for cutting off Astaire's feet at the ankles; the DVD Talk review states the optical conversion actually cut the sides of the frame, not the top and bottom. IMDb notes that many, including Astaire, blamed Coppola for the framing, but that Warner Bros. decided the conversion after filming was complete.⁵^•¹⁵

Reception and later revivals

Critical response to the film was divided. The Metacritic aggregate of 59 is labeled "mixed or average", with 4 positive, 4 mixed, and 2 negative reviews among the 10 counted.⁶ Variety called it a light, pastoral fantasy with civil rights angles and an "ethereal quality"; Pauline Kael wrote that the young Coppola did his best to keep things moving; Renata Adler of The New York Times called the cast artificially insincere; and TV Guide called it one of many musical stinkers of a decade infamous for them.⁶ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds 47% from 19 critics and 51% from more than 2,500 audience ratings.⁴ A later critic summarized the split: the film "remains one of Coppola's most debated pictures, with many finding it enchanting and others declaring it execrable".⁴

The stage show returned to Broadway in 2009 in what New York magazine called the first-ever Broadway revival, directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle at the St. James Theatre, starring Jim Norton, Kate Baldwin, and Cheyenne Jackson.¹⁶^•¹⁷ Critics received it warmly: The New York Times's Charles Isherwood praised its "infectious song and exuberant dancing", and Variety's David Rooney called it "an infectious charmer with a winning cast and one of Broadway's most consistently melodious scores".² A 2017 revival at Irish Repertory Theatre, adapted and directed by Charlotte Moore, was framed by TDF as a musical whose most fantastical element is its vision of a small American town overcoming class and racial divides.⁷

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 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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