1945: State Fair

State Fair (Walter Lang, 1945) 6/10

The State Fair is one of the quintessential embodiments of classic Americana. Fusing the joyful carefree nature of a carnival with an expansive competitve aspect, the State Fair is one of America's most notable annual traditions.

In an age of technological wonder and gadgetry it is surprising to note the surviving popularity of this beloved institution. In 2005, over a third of the state population of Iowa visited that year's State Fair: a tally of over a million people in a state with a population sitting under three million citizens.

On three occasions, Twentieth-Century Fox utilized Philip Strong's novel in a trio of films entitled State Fair. The first was directed in 1933 by the studio's prolific craftsman Henry King as a straight-up melodrama. The second was a lavish 1945 remake by Walter Lang (no relation to Fritz), which followed the basic setting and plot of the original, but infused a whimsical musical aspect scored by Rogers and Hammerstein.

The third and final adaptation was a disasterous 1962 musical version directed by José Ferrer and starring Ann Margaret, Bobby Darin adn Pat Boone. Shifting the action from Iowa to Texas, the popular cast which also included a return to the screen of Fox's biggest musical star Alice Faye after a sixteen year absence. But by 1962, the property had become antiquated: leading many scholars to wonder why Fox even bothered to remake the film once more.

In 1945 however, Fox were in a conundrum. Unable to film Broadway's most popular musical Oklahoma, the studio instead decided to do the next best thing: hire the musical's songwriters Rogers and Hammerstein to score a remake from the studio's vault. In the wake of MGM's successful musical Meet Me In St. Louis, Fox decided to rework State Fair as a musical. Corralling young ingenue Jeanne Crain and Noirish frontman and ex-accountant Dana Andrews into the roles of the film's two principal lovers, the film focuses on the exploits of the Frakes family: a close-knit farming family who each have their reasons for going to the State Fair.

While the family's patriarch Abel (Charles Winninger) and his wife Melissa (Fay Bainter) each aim to win various contests, the teenagers aim to find romance. Crain's Margy loses interest in her boring fiancé to be Harry Ware and soon falls head over heels for mouthy journalist Pat Gilberg (Dana Andrews); while her brother Wayne (Dick Haymes) woos singer Emily Joyce (Vivian Blaine) to compensate for the fact his longtime girlfriend Elenanor (Jane Nigh) is banned from attending the fair. Abel and his ailing prize boar Blue Boy fight for the prized "Blue Ribbon", as Melissa attempts to avoid the advances of a drunk judge and give a snooty rival her comeuppance.

State Fair is an overtly upbeat slice of Americana. Wedged somewhere in between Minnelli's 1944 Meet Me In St. Louis and Charles Walters' 1950 Summer Stock, State Fair is a breezy, pedestrian film, which sticks to the wartime attitude of reflecting upon simpler times. Through the State Fair love can be found, the moral ugliness of individuals can be uncovered and acclaim for life's persistent struggles can be rewarded. Or at least that is how it is interpreted in Lang's film.

Whilst the material evidently provides room to dissect this social microcosm of American culture little is done within the material. Instead provincialist attitudes about urbanites and artists are widespread. Had Fox decided to produce the film more than half a decade earlier, one could even argue the possibility of State Fair being an isolationist picture. Characters such as Andrews' reporter are viewed with an initial mistrust, due to their city ethics and lack of association with the flavours of country life; while transient singers such as Vivian Joyce are to be viewed with suspicion due to their inability to hone roots within the community or secure relationships with people such as Margy's naïve brother Wayne.

Like Meet Me In St. Louis it shows the response of a family toward a fair. In Minnelli's film, the World's Fair becomes the event which binds and inspires the family members to coalesce their community spirit. In Lang's picture, the fair embodies less an aura of progress, but more a less inhibited desire to avoid social evolution. Unlike, the Smith family in Meet Me In St. Louis, the people attending the fair appear eager to resist characters and movements which threaten the essence of their rural lives.

As with Summer Stock, the central female protagonist abandons a relationship with a wealthy, yet dull man of considerable community influence in order to find love with an educated, arrogant urbanite. For these rural women, the values of their parents generation no longer hold the same degree of sway. The unspoken rigid class identities seen at the fair between agrarian lower class Mrs. Frakes and her bourgeoise rival are not contested with the same undercurrent of temporal satisfaction.

Instead in State Fair, the grown children abandon their parent's quaint caravan in order to search for their happiness, rather than their parents. Unlike in George Marshall's woefully underrated The Mating Game the parents do not seem eager to siphon off their children, nor do their children appear willing to connect with any desires or plans their parents have for them.

Unremarkably, the film ends under the similarly contrived circumstances upon which it is established. The follies of romance and mistakes in judgment made by the teenagers could have ended under a neat setting: avoiding formulaic conclusions and providing a touch of melancholy to their parents' consistent disconnection from their teenage lives. Yet, any didactic or moralist implications is erased in an ending that subtracts all of their previous errors and starts things anew.

Walter Lang's State Fair is an enjoyable, yet uneventful slice of Americana and cinematic hokum. Despite its score by Rogers and Hammerstein which resulted in Oscar winning song "It Might As Well Be Spring", the musical qualities of State Fair are overall evidently flat and forgettable in comparison to other Rogers and Hammerstein scored musicals. This can be argued to their status as "songwriters for hire" in the case of this film unlike their other successful cinematic adaptations The Sound Of Music and Oklahoma! in which they wrote the songs and story.

With wartime restrictions clamping down on usable materials, Lang like Minnelli earlier is able to achieve an amazingly high visual standard in the film's production values and Leon Shamroy's cinematography. Yet despite the archiac nature of the material, it can be argued that the latter would have been arguably better served by the advent of Cinemascope half a decade later. The cast featuring Crain, Andrews, Blaine and Haymes is pleasant enough, but not revelatory. The studio system casting of Andrews in particular is interesting given his reputation as a Noir actor, but the limited capabilities of Crain and Andrews keep the performances like the film itself charming, but constrained.

*The 1945 version of State Fair is available through Fox Home Video in a DVD set including the 1962 edition

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque