State Fair (1962)

I mentioned a few weeks back that the 1962 Pat Boone version of State Fair was in the FXM rotation, and that it was one of the few movies currently in the rotatoin that I haven't done a post about. With that in mind, I recorded it so that I could do a post on it for the next airing. That airing is tomorrow, Dec. 18, at 6:00 AM, so now we get the post on it.

Sadly, the FXM print stars off with the opening credits in Cinemascope, before the action is panned-and-scanned down to 16:9. Pat Boone is driving the sort of sports car that would get used as a racing car but is also street legal. Boone is Wayne Frake, living in the small farming town of Banning, TX together with his parents Abel (Tom Ewell) and Melissa (Alice Faye) and his kid sister Margy (Pamela Tiffin). All of them are getting ready to go to the Texas State Fair in Dallas, held annually around the end of September to the beginning of October.

Mom is known for her canning skills, having produced award-winning pickles in a previous year. This year, she's planning on entering her mince meat, but she's also going to be put in a division that has her against more industrial kitchens, which seems rather unfair although hers is not the main story in the movie. Dad's story isn't either, although he's got a subplot involving the showing of his prize pig Blue Boy. Although Blue Boy is a pig that could well win the prize, he's also temperamental, and that could sink Abel's ambitions.

But, as I implied in the previous paragraph, it's really the two adult children's stories that are the bigger stories here. Margy is supposed to be a naïve small-town farm girl, although you'd think she'd have gone to Dallas with the rest of the family for previous editions of the fair. Here, on her first day at the fair, she meets roving reporter Jerry Dundee (Bobby Darin), who covers various attractions at the fair for the TV broadcasts and also does a musical lyrics game that Margy wins a consolation prize in. That prize is really just an excuse for Jerry to pursue Margy, although the pursuit is not in a bad way. The feeling between the two is mutual, with the question of what's going to happen to the relationship after the fair ends. This question is amplified when Jerry gets a good job offer, but it's to be a sportscaster in Big Ten football which would take him immediately to Chicago.

As for Wayne, he takes his car out on the dirt track for qualifying laps, and has one of the fastest qualifying times, which earns him a small prize that's presented by Emily Porter (Ann-Margret), a singer who's originally from New Jersey and doesn't know the first thing about farming, and knows that farm life isn't right for her. She really does fall for Wayne, and he even harder for her, but like Margy's relationship with Jerry, there's the question of how it's going to wind up. In Wayne's case, there's also the issue that he's supposed to have a girl back home. And he's also got the subplot of the big dirt track race that comes even after Mom and Dad's competitions.

This version of State Fair didn't get the best of reviews on its original release back in 1962, and I can see why, although I don't think it's anywhere near as bad as the critics or box office might lead you to think. One thing is that it is old fashioned; the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical came out in the mid-1940s and that's a decade after the first movie version (not a musical) with Will Rogers as the father back in 1933. I also have to say that Ewell is particularly badly cast as the father, not projecting rural Texas at all. Tiffin is also miscast, although to me it wasn't as bad as Ewell. The fact that there's some fair amount of location shooting helps, however.

All told, I think I'd recommend finding all three versions of State Fair to compare and contrast and judge for yourself.