I wish I could review just the first half-hour or so of this 2 ½ hour film. 

The Music Man starts out strong from the first frame.  Miniature marching band figures animated through stop-motion are used in the opening credits.  Columns of the figures spell out some names.  For some titles, they form outlines of instruments.

The first scene after the credits is in a train compartment where travelling salesmen do an a cappella number lamenting Professor Harold Hill and how his roguish behavior has scorched the earth for their operations.  The rumble of the train establishes the rhythm in this clever call-and-response piece that feels like a precursor to rap.  The number ends when it is revealed Hill has been in this car the entire time.  As one salesman prompts him, “I didn’t catch your name.”  “I don’t believe I dropped it”.

Jumping the train at the next stop, Hill (Robert Preston) finds himself trying to sell to a small town everything needed to establish a marching band.  The next clever number establishes how unfriendly the townfolk can be: “We could stand nose-to-nose for a week and still not see eye-to-eye”.  There are a lot of clever visuals as well, such as a couple standing in front the church looking like the painting American Gothic.

So far, the film has established a bar I expected the rest of the picture to clear.  Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t have much longer to go before I felt it turned on me.

That happens around the time of the famous scene where Hill convinces the town they need a marching band.  Strange that I already knew of this scene for decades before actually watching it, as it is parodied on The Simpsons with “The Monorail Song”.  I prefer the parody to the real thing, which goes on for waaay too long. 

Hill’s primary obstacle in sealing the deal is Shirley Jones, the town’s librarian and piano teacher.  She immediately sees through him and even finds the evidence to discredit him.  Naturally, Hill eventually sweeps her off her feet, starting with the first scene that deeply irritated me.  This is a musical number in the library which is basically him refusing to take repeated “no’s” from her while simultaneously making her job more difficult.  Harold Hill, con artist and proto-incel.

I must say I don’t care much for Jones’s style of singing, though I acknowledge she is very talented.  The rest of the cast fares pretty well.  Buddy Hackett is good here, though I could have done without his song-and-dance number.  The future Ron Howard was very young when he made this film as “Ronny Howard” and I found his character’s lisp very annoying.  He has one song that sounds like Daffy Duck singing. 

My biggest complaint is this movie is simply too long.  It’s roughly the length of Singin’ In the Rain, but too many of the scenes and numbers here neither advance the story nor provide new insights into the characters.  I suspect the movie includes absolutely everything from the long-running musical and maybe then some.  But this is a film and, being a different medium, it should only have in it what works best for that medium.

There’s not much more I feel I need to say about The Music Man.  It is so legendary, and referenced in so many things, I felt like I had already seen it.  It is amazing for the first half-hour, which only makes it that much more disappointing when it becomes a chore to finish.  I may see this again at some point, but I suspect I’ll turn it off long before the ending.

Dir: Morton DaCosta

Starring Robert Preston, Shirley Jones

Watched on blu-ray