Cliff notea6/8/2023 ![]() The two friends reminisce about their shady dealings in the past, and that "Professor Hill"'s current racket is boys' bands. Marcellus says that he is now making an honest living, has settled in River City, and that he likes the town and the people. He is delighted to find an old friend and colleague from his earlier days as a crooked salesman, Marcellus Washburn ( Buddy Hackett). They sing him a song of welcome, explaining that Iowans are stubborn but good natured and generous. Hill finds himself in a small turn-of-the-century Iowa town, full of taciturn people with small-town values. (This opening song has interesting musical accompaniment: the sound of the train's steam locomotive.) At the end of the song, just when the train is about to start up from a station stop in River City, Iowa, one of the people reveals that he is Harold Hill, and quickly escapes from the train before the others can catch him. Someone mentions that "He don't know one note from another!". They are particularly scornful of a certain "Professor" Harold Hill ( Robert Preston), who goes into a town, sells the kids musical instruments, instruction books, and band uniforms, under the promise that he will form a band for them, and then disappears. The movie opens with a number of traveling salesmen in a railroad car in 1912, lamenting the things that are making their livelihood difficult-changes in society and the economy, and dishonest salesmen who give them a bad name. Further complications may ensue if any of those traveling salesmen who have been following his route through the territory catch up with and expose him. Harold starts to fall for Marian, something that never happened with any of the other music teachers. What Harold does not know is that one way to Marian is through her young adolescent brother, Winthrop Paroo, a sullen boy who has withdrawn from life since their father's death two years before, when he started to lisp. Her exterior is partly due to her somewhat removed standing in the town, as all the gossipy housewives believe she is a smut peddler - encouraging the teenagers to read authors such as Chaucer and Balzac - and mistakenly believe that she got her position as librarian through less-than-scrupulous means. ![]() He's able to impress all the other River Citizens with his fast-talking sales pitches, but not suspicious Marian, whose hard-as-nails exterior is unlike all the other River Citizens. River City's music teacher is spinster and town librarian Marian Paroo. That is the case when he arrives in River City, Iowa, population 2,212, where he will have some unexpected help from Marcellus Washburn, a friend and former grifter colleague who now lives in River City and has gone straight, but he still wants to make sure Harold survives his stay in town. And if the town doesn't believe it has a youth problem needing to be fixed, he will manufacture one for them. For Harold's scheme to work, he must gain the trust of the local music teacher, usually by wooing her, regardless of her appearance. Many of the traveling salesmen in the territory have been negatively impacted by him, as the townsfolk then become suspicious of any stranger trying to sell them something. ![]() However, in reality, he has no degree and knows nothing about music, and after all the materials arrive and are distributed, he absconds with all the money, never to be seen again. He takes money from the townsfolk to buy instruments, music, instructional materials, and uniforms for their sons. A con man going by the assumed name Harold Hill has used several different schemes to bilk the unsuspecting, and now travels from town to town pretending to be a professor of music - from the Gary (Indiana) Conservatory of Music, class of '05 - who solves all the respective towns' youth problems by forming boys' marching bands. It's the early 20th-century American Midwest.
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