ALAN writes:

Timewise, the 1962 motion picture The Music Man is only seven decades removed from the filth and junk that Americans today agree to accept in the name of entertainment. Morally, metaphysically, and esthetically, it is light-years removed.

It is from the summer of 1962 that I recall seeing advertisements on our black and white television for that new motion picture.  It seemed the ads were shown repeatedly.  One brief scene showed Robert Preston marching toward the camera in front of a large brass band.

But for whatever reason, at that time the promotional blurbs did not inspire my desire to see the movie. At age 12, I had yet to develop an appreciation for such entertainment; that would come several years later.

The movie was released that summer and played at the ornate Ambassador Theater at Seventh and Locust Streets in the heart of downtown St. Louis. (It was demolished in 1996. Architect Robert Powers wrote: “….the Ambassador was, in its day, perhaps the most spectacular of the St. Louis movie palaces, easily in league with the Fox. It was the last remaining movie palace in downtown…..” Source)

In August 1962, the movie was given glowing reviews in the two daily St. Louis newspapers.

I heard the movie decades before I watched it. That was because legendary St. Louis radio announcer John McCormick played the complete soundtrack album several times during his all-night radio program somewhere in the years 1966-’68. Many years would then go by before I saw the movie. But hearing that music and speak-songs like “Rock Island” and “Ya Got Trouble” became a memory I would never forget.

Then one day a few years later I was looking through my father’s modest collection of LP record albums. He lived modestly throughout his life, so the fact that he had two LP soundtrack albums from The Music Man (one from the Broadway production and the other from the motion picture) proved that he thought very highly of it, indeed.

More than thirty years then went by and my father’s life ended before I sat down one evening to watch The Music Man with my undivided attention.  I thought it was wonderful.

More than ten years later, I watched it for a second time and found it to be even more wonderful.  A few weeks ago, I watched it for a third time, and then again, and then again.  It becomes more enjoyable with each viewing and is richly rewarding in many ways and for many reasons. As with any classic motion picture, repeated viewings enable the viewer to enjoy it more fully by noting details that cannot all be seen and appreciated in only one viewing and by watching how other actors and actresses react in certain scenes to the song or dance or speech of the main character at that moment.

How I regret not having gone, at age 12, to the Ambassador Theater one day in 1962 to see The Music Man on the big screen and in an audience of well-mannered, well-attired moviegoers.

How I regret not having talked with my father at length about how and when he first saw that movie and how and why he came to appreciate it as much as he did.

Highlights in the movie include:

— Robert Preston’s flawless performance of “Ya Got Trouble”.

— The scene in the high school auditorium where Professor Hill introduces himself and the song “Seventy-Six Trombones”.

— The scene in the library where Professor Hill plants a marshmallow in Marian the Librarian’s open mouth, and then avoids her wrath by descending rapidly from the balcony to the main floor by means of the book-lift.

— Three songs sung to perfection by Shirley Jones: “Goodnight My Someone”, “Being in Love”, and “Till There was You”.

— How Professor Hill eludes the Buffalo Bills by diverting them into song whenever they approach him and ask to see his credentials.

— The scene near the end where Professor Hill acknowledges he is a liar and thereby sets the basis for his character’s redemption.

I think of this movie as portraying “Old America”, and by that I mean two things:

1)  The more obvious is the America depicted in the story of small-town in 1912, and of townspeople who are self-governing instead of taking orders from a distant central government.

2)  The less obvious but more significant is the “Old America” reflected in the form and style in which the movie is presented and directed.  It is thoroughly Old School, which is why it is as good as it is.  That includes the excellent cinematography; scenes punctuated by the classic fade-to-black; the marvelous melodies and words in Meredith Willson’s music; the projection throughout the story of a benevolent sense of life; the tilt upward — morally, metaphysically, and esthetically — concretized in music, melody, dance, colors, joyfulness, and confidence; and the happy ending.

In 2002, Lawrence Auster wrote about what he called the breakdown of Western Form, exemplified by the hideous noise that is now commonly inflicted on people in public and semi-public places and to which few of them object.  [“The Breakdown of Western Form”, View from the Right, Nov. 22, 2002]

By contrast, The Music Man is a glorious example of how Western Form was upheld and respected by Americans, both those depicted in the story itself and in the culture in which the movie was made and received.  As late as the early 1960s, Americans — mostly older Americans — still understood and valued the importance of form, style, restraint, orderliness, and esthetic attractiveness in daily life and in the entertainment industry.

American culture had descended to a very low point indeed in the 1980s when Professor Revilo Oliver expressed his judgment that “Americans have become a nation of boobs”. It is of course much, much worse today.

The Music Man is about a swindle that con-artist Hill plans with meticulous care but then abandons when he falls in love with Marian and realizes the virtues in the straight life.

Alas, Americans today are too witless to realize that they are the victims of a gigantic moral-philosophical-esthetic swindle:  Unlike Professor Hill’s con-artist who redeems himself in the end, they are the targeted pigeons of professional racketeers who have sold them abominable noise while calling it “music”.

What kind of people would agree thus to be swindled? Would agree to accept the lie that abominable noise is “music”, to congratulate each other for doing so, and thereby to teach their children to believe such a lie?

The domineering presence today of primitive, abominable noise in retail stores, shopping malls, traffic, restaurants, and sporting events is but one consequence of that thoroughly successful swindle.  By contrast, the people of Iowa in 1912 (about whom Meredith Willson was writing) and Americans in 1962 (who produced a splendid motion picture) had not agreed to abandon their common sense or the moral-philosophical frame of mind by which they maintained it.

The Music Man was created by one man, Meredith Willson — not by a committee of team-players, yes-men, or trend-followers.

Fortunately for us, he wrote in years when Americans still understood and valued freedom of speech and thought.  Rather than pander to the lowest common drivel, he wrote to commemorate and celebrate the joy of life in a musical play without any elements of doom, darkness, depravity, cynicism, or resentment.

The movie was made and released at a time shortly before the cataclysmic Cultural Revolution would begin in earnest in 1964-’65 and have, as one its unstated goals, the destruction of Western Form.  It is therefore one of the last expressions, in the form of motion picture entertainment, of the moral-philosophical sense of life and frame of mind that most Americans not only possessed but held securely and confidently up to and including the early 1960s.

Characters in the story sing about the city of Gary, Indiana, when it was civilized and productive, decades before it would be abandoned (by American white men whose ancestors built it) and surrendered to decay, vandalism, and savages to the point where it is now a prime exhibit in Americans’ national and cultural suicide.

There is much good-natured humor in the story, and all of it is Old School.  None of it is remotely similar to the comedy of resentment that dominates the drivel that zombified Americans now accept as entertainment.

Nothing like The Music Man could be conceived in today’s American anti-culture because today’s American anti-culture is utterly and thoroughly degenerate.  Americans today cannot even think or speak in opposition to the premises, vocabulary, and speech codes that they have been foolish enough to allow their most calculating enemies to impose on them.

Most of them today would apologize for the “lack of diversity” in The Music Man — thus proving what good pupils they are by regurgitating the slogans that they have been taught to imbibe and repeat on command. Unlike Professor Harold Hill, such people are beyond redemption. When people in your tribe become so weak-willed that they agree to apologize for their virtues and those of their ancestors, you can be certain your tribe is dead.

Meredith Willson could not have imagined anything so vile as the moral-philosophical-cultural inversion of values that Americans today applaud themselves for. He intended The Music Man as a valentine to his hometown.  It is certainly that, but it is also more than that:  It is a celebration of virtues and of being alive and conscious of the beauty and joy and splendor that life offers.

At the time of the Broadway production, TIME magazine wrote: “The Music Man is a monument to golden unpretentiousness and wholesome fun…”.  (TIME, July 21, 1958, p. 46). As such, it was a much-needed alternative to the “sick humor” and “anti-hero” elements that were being inserted increasingly into American motion picture and television entertainment in the 1950s. Americans today could not even understand it without trying to rewrite it to conform to their monstrous inversion of values.

Actress Greer Garson said:

“I prefer upbeat stories that send people out of the theater feeling better than they did coming in…

“Producers should have more courage. People will respond to stories with love and courage and happy endings instead of shockers.  I think the mirror should be tilted slightly upward when it’s reflecting life–toward the cheerful, the tender, the compassionate, the brave, the funny, the encouraging–and not tilted down to the troubled vistas of conflict….”

(Michael Troyan, A Rose for Mrs. Miniver: The Life of Greer Garson, Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1999, p. 327 )

The Music Man is a splendid application of the wisdom in her judgment. Its director, Morton da Costa, said likewise in 1957:

“I thought the time had come to send the public out of the theater light-hearted instead of depressed.  I wanted this to come off as a story about a charming renegade who reforms, a show with a lot of love and no hate, one that a sophisticated viewer could see with pleasure and that a child could watch with understanding….”  (TIME, July 21, 1958, p. 46 )

He and Meredith Willson certainly achieved that laudable goal.

A show with “no hate”, no darkness, no depravity, no dirty words, no resentment …. imagine such a thing in American entertainment today!  Such a thing cannot be imagined because The Music Man celebrates life—whereas American entertainment today celebrates the negation of life.

If Meredith Willson’s wonderful songs in The Music Man do not linger in your memory and do not inspire you to get up and march around the room, then you must be dead morally, emotionally, metaphysically, and esthetically — which is to say:  A typical American today.

“What a great country this was to have produced a movie like this,” Lawrence Auster wrote in 2012 about his appreciation of an American movie from 1952.  [“Phone Call from a Stranger”, View from the Right, Dec. 7, 2012]

I suggest exactly the same judgment applies to The Music Man and the country and culture in which it was created.

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