Trailer
Plot summary
Finian McLonergan leaves Ireland with his daughter Sharon and a crock of gold he has taken from the leprechaun Og. He heads for Rainbow Valley in the state of Missitucky, meaning to bury the gold near Fort Knox in the belief that it will multiply. Og follows, anxious to recover the crock before he becomes human. Woody Mahoney courts Sharon. Woody's friend and partner Howard, an African-American botanist, is developing a tobacco and mint hybrid. Senator Billboard Rawkins, bigoted against African-Americans, believes the valley holds gold and moves to take its land.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Finian's Rainbow (1968)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Jack L. Warner had misgivings about making another musical after the costly Camelot, but when he saw Petula Clark perform on opening night at the Cocoanut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he decided she was the ideal Sharon and forged ahead with Finian's Rainbow.
- Petula Clark recalled that Fred Astaire balked at dancing in "a real field with cow dung and rabbit holes", puzzled by Francis Ford Coppola's modern methods. Though he agreed to shoot a sequence in Napa Valley near Coppola's home, most of the film was made on Warner Bros. sound stages and back lot.
- Petula Clark told BBC Radio 4's The Reunion in August 2012 that she and her fellow cast members smoked marijuana during the filming of Finian's Rainbow, saying: "There was a lot of Flower Power going on."
- Hermes Pan, Fred Astaire's long-time friend and collaborator, worked on the choreography of Finian's Rainbow but was fired by director Francis Ford Coppola during filming.
- The Coen brothers said Finian's Rainbow was one of their favorite films, and while working with Nicolas Cage on Raising Arizona they told him so; Cage told his uncle, director Francis Ford Coppola, who they think has considered them deranged ever since.
- Because preview audiences found the film too long, the number "Necessity" was cut before release, though it stayed on the soundtrack album and can still be heard as background music when Senator Rawkins shows up in Rainbow Valley.
- A construction crew turned more than nine acres of the Warner Bros. back lot into Rainbow Valley, complete with a narrow gauge railway, schoolhouse, general store, post office, houses and barns, while Francis Ford Coppola spent five weeks rehearsing the cast.
- Dick Van Dyke was considered to play the role of Finian, but financial problems delayed filming and he dropped out to work on other projects.
Stills
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