Anyone who refused to abandon himself to the pleasure pure and simple of such films as French Cancan or Silk Stockings had better give Finian's Rainbow … a miss. Like Renoir with his rosily moonlit Butte de Montmartre, or Mamoulian with his Paris which loves lovers, Francis Ford Coppola has created a dream world, half-fact, half-fantasy, and all enchantment: a rural paradise reached by way of the Brooklyn Bridge, Mount Rushmore and the Mississippi riverboats, but unquestionably at the end of the rainbow in a never-never America where true love and simple faith conquer all obstacles.

Schmaltz?… [The] point is that Finian's Rainbow is all of a piece, and like all the best musicals, transmits its feelings not by words or even deeds, but by movement. And the movement of the film is pure exhilaration, without trace of schmaltz or whimsy….

Movement, in fact, is quintessential to Finian's Rainbow...