Our Ohio State Fair is a great state fair. During the gloomy winter months (like now), I can picture our own state fair beginning next July (only 7 months away!) and think of this movie at the same time. I like this movie better than the 1962 version, because I feel that this 1945 version is warmer, homier and more nostalgic than the later version. Blue Boy is the star. He is a main reason for going. So is mother's canned pickle. The drunk judge is hilarious. Winninger and Bainter fabulous. "Grand Night for Singing". In my childhood, there were the Silver Airplanes (I called them that) in an amusement park. I think they were really early spaceship models. I love this song. Fifteen seconds of Dana Andrews and Jeanne Crain (dubbing?) singing this song in those silver airplanes have forever melted in my memory ever since I first saw them in this movie. The other characters sing verses of this song, but IMO Dana's and Jeanne's part is way more memorable. I like the singing hayseed red-bearded Ioway men. This is also a memorable scene, and to this day I still find it snappy and memorable -- also not too hokey (or hokey-pokey, as S.Z. Sakall would say). Coloration still excellent. Costumes and hair colors show up very well. Movie a little draggy in places, however. I still give it high marks. 9/10.

Outside of The Sound of Music, this is my favorite Rodgers and Hammerstein film. I probably don't have much to add to the many reviews already posted about this film. But I wanted to impress on you, the reader, that, if you haven't seen this already, then you really need to see this story of an average all-American family on the way to their state fair, with games and rides, cotton candy and candied apples, contests for baking, livestock, etc., and a lot of fun and angst too. The music is just great, including the Oscar-winning song, "It Might As Well Be Spring" sung by Jeanne Crain, who made many a man's heart go a-twitter. At the fair, she meets Dana Andrews. Dick Haymes is her brother who meets singer Vivian Blaine, and Charles Winninger and Fay Bainter are their parents. The film feels like home to me. That's just about the best compliment a film can get, and they don't come any better than this one.

A few admissions first off -- I haven't seen the later or earlier versions, and I'm a bigger fan of Rodgers' work with Lorenz Hart than I am of the Hammerstein stuff, though I do appreciate it for what it is I guess. This is not a movie that you should try to read too hard into, after all. It's not quite as complex as some of his earlier work like "Oklahoma!" and "Show Boat." But it has some very nice songs, appealing actors playing wholesome characters, very saturated 30s technicolor photography, so basically some people are going to know they hate it within 5 minutes and everyone else will have a good time. I'm one of the people who likes it.The story is very simple -- it's about a family going to the Iowa State Fair (in a time that feels like a strange mix of past and 30s present), where the mom (Fay Bainter) and dad (Charles Winninger) are trying to win prizes and son (Dick Haymes) and daughter (Jeanne Crain) find dubious love. Crain is paired with a newsman played by Dana Andrews and Haymes with a band-singer played by Vivian Blaine.A first look at the scenario tells you that it's a sort of culture-clash -- big city folks falling for country guy and gal. There's a confrontation between the son and a male band-singer (Percy Kilbride, I believe) where all this tension comes to a head, and his relationship with the lady singer cannot continue because of the melodramatic intervention of a previous marriage. However the probable marriage of the Andrews and Crain characters at the end implies the possibility of reconciling the country/town old/new dichotomy.The score isn't really their best as some have noted, but taken on its own it is better than most movie soundtracks. R/H didn't have a whole lot of time to write this one, they basically did it I think in between "Oklahoma!" and "Carousel" because "OK" was a Theater Guild show and they didn't make much money off it at the time, they only made money when the production closed up and the film was made. Crain's character is very much like Laurey in "Oklahoma!" and the elimination of the negative social element of the already married woman aligns in a softer way with the death of Judd Fry in that play or the self-sacrifice of Julie in "Show Boat." This is one of the only parts of the play that probably rings false for modern audiences, because it was obviously designed to fit a certain type of melodrama and these days we would hardly consider a previous marriage a total roadblock to a new marriage. By our standards the son could be criticized for abandoning her, but I guess in the morals of his time it would have been dishonorable for him to pursue a married woman.This film fits very comfortably into the Americana of Oscar Hammerstein, less serious than "Show Boat" and "Carousel" but more convincing than his European adventure with "Sound of Music" or his Siamese "The King and I." I know Hammerstein wanted to stretch out, and definitely Rodgers did some of his best music for "King", but this is the type of story that I think he's best at.As far as the performances, they're pretty much all great. Winninger in particular made me laugh in a lot of his scenes, and Fay Bainter is just wonderful too. Great chemistry between them makes their casting perfect. Winninger's scene where he weeps tears of joy over his pig being victorious reminded me of his famous scene in "Show Boat." Crain was lovely and suitably innocent on screen. Andrews and she have pretty good chemistry, a lot more than Haymes and Blaine. Perhaps that's intentional -- you could even argue that Hammerstein wanted us to feel that the characters were too similar to each other for their romance to work in the long term. They're both phenomenal singers, they're both very willful and confident. Crain's character on the other hand is a bit of a shrinking violet by today's standards I guess, she's "vulnerable." And Andrews is very good at playing a protective type of male, you get the feeling that he could give her more direction while she could organize his life. That sounds sexist but I think it's possibly what Hammerstein was trying to say.

I've no doubt that on the strength of the blockbuster hit that Richard Rodgers&Oscar Hammerstein had with Oklahoma which was still running on Broadway as this film was being made, that Darryl F. Zanuck offered the team the chance to contribute the songs for a remake of State Fair. Oklahoma in fact was a rural setting and so was Iowa for this second telling of the adventures of the Frake family at the Iowa State Fair.What today's audiences don't appreciate was that in 1946 the Iowa state centennial was being celebrated. Some bright individual at 20th Century Fox must have realized that and a nice musical technicolor remake of the Will Rogers classic State Fair would be a can't miss at the box office. Providing of course Mr. Zanuck could assemble the talent.Though the 1933 cast boasted people like Louise Dresser, Lew Ayres, and Janet Gaynor in support of Will Rogers, the accent there was very much on Rogers as it was HIS picture. Here the accent is on the younger generation. Charles Winninger and Fay Bainter play the older Frakes taking their prize hog, Bainter's mince pie, and children Dick Haymes and Jeanne Crain to the Iowa State Fair. Haymes and Crain, together with Dana Andrews and Vivian Blaine as the respective romantic partners carry the film here.Rodgers and Hammerstein had a lot on their plate back in the day. Besides Oklahoma, Hammerstein was involved in creating a musical version of Bizet's Carmen which became Carmen Jones as we all know. He and Rodgers had another musical open in 1945 that was Carousel and became another American classic. When 20th Century Fox signed them for State Fair, according to a recent biography of Dick Rodgers, they never went west. Rodgers did his music from his estate in Connecticut and Hammerstein wrote the lyrics from his Doylestown, Pennsylvania farm. I guess they met in New York and express mailed the songs to Zanuck in Hollywood.They put together a real nice score, one song It Might As Well Be Spring won the Oscar for Best Original Song from a film. The rest of the score ain't too shabby either with Isn't It Kind of Fun and That's For Me also sung beautifully. My favorite however is It's a Grand Night for Singing, a song so absolutely infectious you will be singing it yourself for days after watching State Fair.Andrews and Crain were dubbed by other singers, but Dick Haymes and Vivian Blaine were seasoned musical performers. Haymes recorded all four of the songs above in an album for Decca that sold very well. Haymes had a smooth, but strong baritone and if scandal hadn't blown his career up a few years later, who knows to what heights he might have risen.Every version of State Fair has something to recommend it. There was even a pilot done in the middle Seventies for a television series based on the time honored Frake family saga. For me however this one cops the prize.