The Music Man

One of only three movies my grandfather has ever enjoyed. Perhaps that's because he was raised in the Iowa farm town where it's set. His father ran the general store in Bronson, a place not unlike the River City where a a con man shows up one day to sell the townsfolk on — no, not a monorail — a marching band. This ridiculous and especially heartless con (exploiting the children who just want to play in a band) has the key virtue of providing many opportunities for song. Songs, I hasten to add, that I found surprisingly modest and agreeable. It's a great movie, cheerily evoking the sensibility, stubbornness, and beneath-the-surface warmth of the Midwest. You see, a midwesterner is like a southerner inside-out: Cold on the outside but warm deep down. Exchanges like this are perfect:

You are in I-o-way.
Iowa? Well at least now I know how to pronounce it. I always thought you folks preferred "Iowa".
We do.
Well he just said I-o-way.
We say it now and then, but we don't like anybody else to.

The Music Man is the inspiration for the greatest of all great Simpsons episodes; the whole town a chorus one minute, an angry mob the next. Shirley Jones (aka Ms Partridge) is radiant in that young motherly way (actually pregnant during filming, of course) as the maiden piano teacher, best in a scene stolen by Family Guy for a Lois piano lesson. (Is there one original bit in all of Family Guy?) Little Ron "Opie" Howard is allowed to have devilish fun with an affected lisp. The big musical numbers and crowd scenes are made sumptuous not by lavish set design but by wall-to-wall widescreen compositions that are as active around the edges as in the center. The only number that's really awful is when Buddy Hackett sings Shipoopi, a word no midwesterner could in good conscience utter. Curiously, there is a prominent ode to Gary, Indiana (the Newark of Chicago), a city founded by U.S. Steel that to my knowledge has never been anything but an industrial dump.

The other two are South Pacific and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. (Before retiring from the ministry he spent fifteen years working in a VA psychiatric hospital and always said that Cuckoo's Nest is "pretty accurate".)