Robert Preston is perfection as Professor Harold Hill. It's hard to believe they wanted to cast anyone else, even if the studio's pick was Frank Sinatra. Preston originated the role, and it's hard to imagine anyone else filling those shoes. The entire cast has such amazing chemistry. This is my second favorite musical after West Side Story.
What's intriguing to me about this film is how the Professor's beautiful lie causes a town full of xenophobic, closed-minded country folk to grow, change, and bloom. The townsfolk lie to themselves most of all at the beginning. They hold "sociables" but are very unsociable towards each other and particularly towards outsiders. An entire song, "Iowa Stubborn," is devoted to illustrating the tangle of contradictions in the outlook of the denizens of River City. The name of the town is itself a lie, as while we see a creek or pond here or there, nary a river is to be seen in the town's vicinity.
Eventually the beautiful lie becomes an established truth (albeit with an edge of fantasy to it). In the finale the children show up in cheap, pasted together uniforms with gaudy golden fringe. They can barely play the song Hill has been teaching them all summer - using the "Think System," which is really just playing by ear. Yet the parents jump up and proudly praise their children's talent. The uniforms morph into smart, clean, sleek affairs and the film ends with 76 trombones and all the rest marching down Main Street.
When you think about it, The Music Man is really a story about the artifice of theatre and the lively arts. Theatre is all about entertainment, razzle-dazzle, and making people feel good. Even Shakespeare wrote for the groundlings. And part of that razzle-dazzle includes weaving a beautiful lie that the audience will at once find believable, entertaining, and satisfying. Just as Harold Hill told a beautiful lie which everyone came to believe, even himself in the end, theatre - and by extension, film - takes artifice and turns it into something the audience can believe and may even be changed by.
Every frame of film is a lie, from a certain point of view. When we watch a film we are not actually seeing movement. It is the rapid succession of frames in succession that creates for the viewer an illusion of movement. Essentially it's your brain deliberately lying to you.
Even though Jean-Luc Godard said that film is truth at 24 frames per second, film is more aptly described as one of the most densely layered lies that can be presented. A story is essentially a lie told well, and as stated before the very mechanics of film is a lie the brain tells viewers. Even so, the best stories are those that have a kernel of honesty, those that are believable. And the way that directors and actors weave a believable story is to find the truth under the lie and project that within the subtext. It's the reason why some movies feel more fake than others, because the writer just made it up as they went along and didn't put in the work to craft an otherwise honest story.
The Music Man is far from that, as the climax of the movie is not found in a bombastic, epic song-and-dance number (although it does break the musical rules and places the biggest piece, "Shipoopi" near the end instead of at the start). The real climax is a tender moment shared between Prof. Hill and Marion's younger brother. Winthrop, distraught over nasty comments he has heard about Harold's lies, asks if he actually can lead a band.
"No," Harold replies. There is a moment there where you think he will continue the beautiful lie but instead he comes clean. The lie is broken. Reality rushes in along with the angry mob and the professor has to face the music.
In much the same way every movie must end and the audience must face reality. What Music Man teaches us, then, is not to let the beautiful lie overtake reality, but to let the lessons of the lie guide us when we leave the dark of the theatre and re-emerge into the harsh light of day.
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