The Fantasticks

One of several oddities redeeming the latter part of Ritchie's switchback career, this plays like the last 1950s musical - fittingly, since the Broadway show from which it derives, an adaptation of Rostand's Les Romantiques, actually opened in 1960. Ritchie enthusiastically embraces the unfashionableness both of the narrative (innocent boy/girl romance offset by comic parental scheming) and of the songs (the wistful 'Try to Remember' being the most familiar). The intervention of a Bradbury-esque sinister/magical carnival gives Ritchie the opportunity for some lively staging. But the film's double copyright notation, the abbreviated running time and various loose ends indicate that the suits reacted to this celebration of the passé with dither and dismay.