Watching the founding fathers belt out their opening number at the beginning of '1776' is akin to that pivotal moment in "West Side Story", when Russ Tamblyn and his juvenile delinquents start executing Jerome Robbins dance moves while they finger-snap their way down the street........film musicals, by their nature, freed from the artificiality of a theater stage, demand a much greater leap of faith from their audiences....
These people are going to sing and dance? Okaaaay.......
To those robustly baritone 4rth of July boys, we say......'sing out, you guys! The BQ is loving it....' If there's an alternate universe where Ben Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson do three part harmony while they create America, we want to live in it.....
The making of this film, the last one personally produced by mogul Jack L.Warner carries with it the deepest irony. Having retired from running his namesake studio, Warner made '1776' as an independent producer, with Columbia releasing and distributing the film....
Warner apparently never got over the amount of ridicule and criticism he endured for his bypassing of Broadway role originator Julie Andrews for "My Fair Lady" in favor of Audrey Hepburn. To Warner's everlasting humiliation, Walt Disney made a movie star and Best Actress Oscar winner out of Andrews in "Mary Poppins".....the same year as "My Fair Lady". The mogul's ego must have come close to exploding when Andrews, to the roar of the Oscar audience, paid a backhanded compliment to Warner for denying her "My Fair Lady", thereby paving her way to 'Poppins'.
Since he considered the film adaptation of '1776' as his legacy, milestone achievement, Warner curbed his Hollywood star casting impulses and assembled, almost intact, the entire creative team of the Broadway show......cast members, writer Peter Stone, director Peter H.Hunt, choreographer Onna White, composer and lyricist (and creator of the show) Sherman Edwards.
Here comes the irony we promised: Despite his worthy effort to exactly reproduce the musical that entertained Broadway audiences, Warner's film version, opening in the Fall of l972, arrived in a butchered condition, with over a half hour of footage sliced out of it, including its main titles and a key musical number. A block-headed Hollywood reptile to his core, Warner managed to wreak heavy damage on his last produced film.......with the help of his good buddy, the future un-indicted co-conspirator himself, President Richard Nixon.
Nixon didn't much care for the show's lengthy song "Cool, Considerate Men", sung by the Continental Congress's most conservative, independence-resistant members.....(as they trumpet their cautious strategy, they sing of dancing...."to the right, always to the right, never to the left...") Tricky Dick asked Warner to take the number out and on the eve of the film's nationwide release, the malignant mogul excised the song out of the release prints......along with other key footage.
Now the good news: Warner, as was his custom when he ruled his own studio, ordered the cut footage destroyed. But lucky for all of us, in the case of '1776', Warner did not rule his own studio.....and Columbia merely parked the footage in one of its archive warehouses.......thankfully recovered and fully restored to the film's DVD and Blu-Ray editions.
The BQ couldn't recommend a better cinematic 4rth of July celebration than watching the full 2 hour and 45 minute version of '1776'....(along with our other summer holiday fave, "The Devil's Disciple", covered in a previous post).....we'd never miss paying a yearly visit with William Daniel's gloriously rambunctious John Adams, Howard De Silva's ever quipping Ben Franklin, Ken Howard's stalwart Thomas Jefferson.....and Broadway belter John Cullum as South Carolina's aristocratic slavemaster Edward Rutledge....(a character who more than ever reminds us of a Frankenstein mixture of Trump and Jeff Sessions....a preening, egotistical bigot in one nasty package)
For the JackWarner/Richard Nixon version of the movie, we assign no stars....but for the restored Director's Cut....a full flag waving 4 stars (****)......(our only regret: Onna White choreographed "Cool Considerate Men" as a delicate minuet for the cast.....we secretly hoped they'd break into Onna's legendary chicken dance from "Bye Bye Birdie".....)
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