The 1968 Warner-Bros.-Seven Arts film adaptation of E. Y. Harburg & Fred Saidy, and Burton Lane's extraordinary 1947 musical Finian's Rainbow was a longtime coming. The natural path to Hollywood by the late '40s for a successful Broadway musical (725 performances) would have been relatively sure. And indeed a full adaption was sought by MGM in 1948, but Harburg held out for full artistic control and the project foundered. Then an animated film version undertaken in 1954 with an all-star cast including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Louis Armstrong and Jim Backus…but was scuttled in the face of director John Hubley's and Yip Harburg's refusal to cooperate with Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee and Harburg's subsequent Hollywood blacklisting. Francis Ford Coppola's 1968 rendering, with Fred Astaire, Tommy Steele and Petula Clarke in the leading roles, brings out the best in this wonderful, magical, deeply humane story.