The Music Man (film)

• Release Date: 1962
• Director(s): Morton Da Costa
• Writer(s): Marion Hargrove
• Principal Actors and Roles: Shirley Jones (Marian Paroo); Robert Preston (Harold Hill); Paul Ford (Mayor George Shinn); Hermione Gingold (Eulalie Mackechnie Shinn); Buddy Hackett (Marcellus Washburn); Ron Howard (Winthrop Paroo); Pert Kelton (Mrs. Paroo); Susan Luckey (Zaneeta Shinn)
• Book / Story Film Based On: The Music Man by Meredith Willson

The 1962 movie musical The Music Man is based on Meredith Wilson’s 1957 Broadway smash of the same name. It was one of the most successful movies of the year, both in terms of revenue and critical acclaim. The movie version is highly unusual for Hollywood. It is so true to the stage version that reviewers consoled those who had never seen the Broadway hit with the opportunity to see essentially the exact same show on the big screen.

This fidelity to the original is thanks to two factors. First, the stage director, Morton DaCosta, both produced and directed the movie. His goal was to faithfully replicate the stage performances in a movie. Second, many members of the stage cast reprised their roles in the film. The most important of these was Robert Preston in the lead. According to legend, this was over the objections of studio head Jack Warner, who preferred established movie stars for the lead roles when he produced stage musicals for the screen. Although Preston had won a Tony in the stage version of The Music Man, his movie career had not yet taken off. What’s more, Warner thought he was too old for the part. Fortunately for Warner, Wilson and DaCosta won the argument, and the studio’s biggest hit of 1962 was the result.

Contrary to a popular myth, Meredith Wilson was hardly an unknown when he wrote The Music Man. He had written the score for the Charlie Chaplin film The Great Dictator, wrote popular songs such as "You and I" and "It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas," and had worked as a radio actor. However, he had done nothing on the scale of the musical. He spent almost ten years writing the music and lyrics, some of which are brilliantly clever. In the end he delivered one of the most successful musicals of the 1950s, and he played a key role in transferring the stage show to the screen.

Robert Preston, on the other hand, fought an uphill battle to gain a place in the movie. He finally won the role after four "more bankable" players rejected it, and it is hard to imagine anyone else in the part. When casting was underway, Cary Grant supposedly turned down the lead role on the grounds that "nobody could do that role as well as Bob Preston."

Plot

A smooth, fast-talking con man who calls himself "Professor" Harold Hill poses as a traveling salesman to run a music scam in River City, Iowa, in the summer of 1912. Happenstance has placed Hill in River City: he had to escape a train before he was discovered by a car-full of actual salesmen whose livelihoods had been harmed as a result of Hill’s cons.

In River City Hill meets an old confederate who helps him get the lay of the land. Hill reveals that he sells musical instruments and band uniforms to parents and leaves town with the money before he has to deliver on promised music lessons. He searches for a pitch to create the need and latches on to the new pool hall. His angle with the townspeople is that a boys’ band will offset the moral corruption that the pool hall is sure to bring to the sober community.

Hill convinces the skeptical townspeople that he is an expert band leader with a degree from the Gary Conservatory. However, he has two problems. First, the pool hall is owned by the town’s mayor. His second problem is the town’s librarian and piano teacher, Marian Paroo. He correctly determines that Marian is the person in town who is most likely to uncover his fraud. Moreover, her mother is from Gary, Indiana, and Hill has claimed to have received a degree from the conservatory a year before it opened. Marian discovers Hill’s fakery almost immediately, but before she can warn the mayor, Hill begins to have an unintentional positive influence on the town.

He turns the squabbling school board members into a perfectly harmonizing barbershop quartet. A group of gossiping biddies becomes a dance committee. Most importantly to Marian, her withdrawn, miserable younger brother is transformed into a happy child when he dreams of playing in a marching band. Marian begins to fall for Hill, even though she knows he is a con man.

Despite himself, Hill reciprocates her feelings. When the uniforms and instruments arrive, he ignores his cue to skip town. A traveling anvil salesman exposes Hill as a huckster. Enraged citizens chase him down in order to tar and feather him. Hill is captured because his new love for Marian prevents him from fleeing.

His only way to save himself is to use his "think system" to get the band to perform. Miraculously, the uniformed boys produce something resembling a recognizable tune, and in the adoring eyes of their parents, they are transformed into a top-notch marching band performing "Seventy-Six Trombones" as they make their expert way down River City’s Main Street.

Hill and Marian march joyously with the now-spectacular boys’ band.

Significance

In 2005 The Music Man was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. In addition to being one of the country’s most beloved movie musicals of all time, The Music Man was one of the top-grossing films of 1962. Critics also loved the movie, and it received nominations for six Academy Awards, winning one for the best musical score. The nominations were for best picture, best art direction, best sound, best costume design, and best editing.

It was also honored as best musical at the 1963 Golden Globe awards, at which it received five additional nominations: DaCosta (best director), Wilson (best score), Preston (best actor in a musical), Shirley Jones (best actress in a musical), and Hermione Gingold (best supporting actress in a musical). Gingold and Jones were already established movie figures, but The Music Man moved Preston into a new tier in Hollywood.

Awards and nominations

Won

• Academy Award (1962) Best Score (Adapted)
• Golden Globe (1963) Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy)

Nominated

• Academy Award (1962) Best Picture
• Academy Award (1962) Best Director: Morton DaCosta
• Academy Award (1962) Best Actor (Musical or Comedy): Robert Preston
• Academy Award (1962) Best Actress (Musical or Comedy): Shirley Jones
• Academy Award (1962) Best Supporting Actress: Hermione Gingold
• Academy Award (1962) Best Costume Design (Color): Dorothy Jeakins
• Academy Award (1962) Best Score: Meredith Willson
• Academy Award (1962) Best Sound
• Academy Award (1962) Best Film Editing
• Academy Award (1962) Best Art Direction-Set Direction (Color)

Bibliography

Garcia, Desiree. The Migration of Musical Film: From Ethnic Margins to American Mainstream. Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2014. Print.

Hischak, Thomas S. The Oxford Companion to the American Musical Theatre, Film, and Television. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Kurti, Jeff. The Great Movie Musical Trivia Book. Milwaukee: Applause Theatre & Cinema, 2000. Print.

Oates, Bill. Meredith Wilson—America’s Music Man: The Whole Broadway—Symphonic—Radio—Motion Picture Story. Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2005. Print.

Wilson, Meredith. "But He Doesn’t Know the Territory": The Making of Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2009. Print.