MIKE'S MURDER 1984

Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review, so plot points are revealed for the purpose of discussion.

Falling into the category of favorite obscurities that fascinate as much as they frustrate is James Bridges’ distinctively internal neo-noir, Mike’s Murder. A thoroughly unique and obviously heartfelt project from one of the more underappreciated directors of the '70s. 

Mike's Murder fascinates because it’s one of those films that slipped through the cracks, released both too late—the ‘70s were over, small, hard-to-categorize movies were out, and ’80s blockbusters and high-concept franchises were in; and too soon—personal, quirky movies came back into fashion with the indie film boom of the ‘90s. Mike's Murder frustrates because, as much as I absolutely love this film, it nevertheless remains a movie that, much like its characters, is haunted by its past.

Living In Rear-View in Car-Centric L.A. 

Looking back is the only way she can move forward 

My own enthusiasm for Mike's Murder stems significantly, though only partially, from being a huge fan of Debra Winger, whose nuanced, almost delicate performance—arguably one of her best—is the glue holding this melancholy thriller together. But as one of those emotionally insular, urban-set, psychologically dark films of the sort that have always appealed to me (like Midnight Cowboy, Klute, Looking for Mr. Goodbar), it can also be said that Mike's Murder—figuratively speaking, anyway—already had my name all over it. 

The real mystery: Was it love or limerence? 

I first saw Mike’s Murder at the Vogue Theater on Hollywood Boulevard the week it opened in March of 1984. I sat in a theater that was less than half full and remember being surprised by the low turnout, especially considering how popular Winger was at the time. 

The romantic An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) had boosted Winger's visibility, with the Oscar nomination she received for it branded her a bona fide star-on-the-rise, plus, the recently released Terms of Endearment, for which she received her second Best Actress Oscar nomination just a few weeks earlier, was still in theaters, attracting large audiences.

However, part of me wasn't entirely surprised by the half-empty theater I occupied, for Mike’s Murder—a film completed and scheduled to be released before Terms of Endearment—had arrived at theaters under a cloud of poor word-of-mouth and almost a year’s worth of negative publicity related to its troubled production history: Its original release date kept being moved; it was nearly shelved; there was talk of rehoots and heavy rediting; and finally its distributing studio lost faith it, more or less dumping it into theaters in an effort to ride the crest of Winger's Terms of Endearment fame wave.

 The film's title sequence shows the making of a Big Tomy's chiliburger in such mouthwatering detail that, to this day, seeing just a few seconds of it can set off chiliburger cravings that can last a week. Big Tomy's opened in 1982 and, still in operation, has become an LA landmark.

An early Mike’s Murder casualty was the scrapping of much of the original score composed by ‘80s New Wave artist Joe Jackson and replacing it with a more traditional (and superb) score by Academy Award-winning James Bond composer John Barry.

But nobody weaned on the films of Robert Altman and Joseph Losey pays any attention to bad reviews, so I forged ahead, heedless of the critics calling Mike's Murder a complete waste of time and talent. And that it may well be true, for even after cable-TV and VHS exposure, Mike's Murder never really found an audience. But I fell in love with Mike's Murder from the word go. I was completely won over by everything about it. 

As yet another moody rumination on my time-honored, favorite movie theme: the innate human desire to find connection—Mike’s Murder resonated strongly as a lens held up to the urban “fear of being alone” phenomenon that leads people to settle for what's available rather than going without or asking for what they truly want. But for a movie with such an assertively '80s vibe, Mike’s Murder genuinely felt like a film made during my favorite, most experimentally exciting period in moviemaking—the New Hollywood Era of the late '60s- ’70s. 

Debra Winger as Betty Parrish

Mark Keyloun as Mike Chuhutsky

Paul Winfield as Phillip Greene

Darrell Larson as Steve

Conceived as a uniquely Los Angeles “Cherchez L’homme” crime-mystery and character study told from the tentative perspective of its female protagonist, bank teller Betty Parrish, Mike’s Murder uses the detached attachments of LA hookup culture and the irrevocable undertow of violence in the Beverly Hills-Brentwood drug scene of the coked-up '80s to explore themes of isolation, ambiguous loss, unresolved grief, and reconciled loneliness in The City of “Whatever.” (A character’s answer when pressed to define the status of a relationship -- “New lover, boyfriend, whatever…?” Also, the only appropriate response when a guy like Mike says, "I’ll call. I mean it." ).

When news of James Bridges making a film titled Mike’s Murder first started appearing in the trades, I wasn’t sure whether that possessive apostrophe referred to a murder Mike commits or one he falls victim to. 

Betty Parrish has her life well organized. She has a nice job, a cute house, a cool car (a helluva cool car), caring friends and family, she dates from time to time, and owns a baby grand piano. The only kink—literally and metaphorically—in her otherwise structured life is “The C-scale out of tune,” as she calls him: Mike Chuhutsky. A puppy-dog-cute Ohio-to-Los Angeles transplant and rootless ladies’ man who gets by on occasion. As in, occasionally giving tennis lessons, occasionally dealing drugs, occasionally telling the truth, and occasionally being the live-in, transactionally bisexual object of affection of a wealthy record producer named Phillip Greene.

A character describing Mike: “He had all kinds of stories that he used on different people. He was always preparing a face for the faces that he met.”

“On occasion” is also an apt description of Betty’s dickmatized, casual-to-the-point-of-impromptu relationship with the chameleonic Mike, whose freewheeling life—no phone, no car, no steady address, and disappearances lasting up to six months—leaves their hookups overly-reliant on chance encounters or the odd booty call. 

Although mutually attracted and sharing a strong sexual chemistry, Betty and Mike are very nearly complete strangers (perhaps explaining where all that great sexual chemistry comes from). So, when one of Mike’s characteristically flaky no-shows turns out to be due to his having been brutally murdered in a botched drug deal, Betty is thrown into an emotional tailspin. Confronted with the abrupt finality of her present—all unexplored and unresolved feelings now subsumed by grief—Betty grows increasingly, and ultimately dangerously, invested in piecing together the disturbing fragments of Mike’s shrouded past to get a better handle on why this guy has made such an indelible impression on her. 

Debra Winger on Betty being sexually fixated on Mike: “She was brought up well and has a great relationship with her mother. She has a good job and does it well. But she has this other side that people may not see at first. She needs that guy every three months. She and Mike don’t light candles. It's hot stuff. It’s sweaty, fast, and sometimes rough. She doesn’t introduce Mike to her mother. “

Atmospheric, tense, and one of those movies I knew I would return to again and again to pick up details of plot and character, I remember my first thoughts after seeing Mike’s Murder were: 1) Debra Winger is astonishingly good, and 2) this movie is gay as fuck.

The innate Queerness of Mike’s Murder leapt out at me years before I even knew its producer/writer/director was gay. Mike's Murder is a labor-of-love passion project by the late two-time Oscar-nominee James Bridges (The Baby Maker, The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome, Urban Cowboy) that was inspired by a tragic real-life event shared by Bridges, his life partner Jack Larson (who produced), and their friend Paul Winfield.

In fact, Winfield’s role has him cast essentially as himself—Winfield, a privately out gay man who was professionally closeted—was tasked with revisiting and reenacting what certainly must have been a very painful period in his life. James Bridges, who became somewhat of a mentor to Debra Winger after casting her in Urban Cowboy, wrote the role of Betty especially for her. 

“The Ephemeral is Eternal” 

Personal favorite Dan Shor (Wise Blood, Strange Behavior), as video performance artist Richard—he's Betty’s “whatever”—reinterprets Baudelaire’s “Extract the eternal from the ephemeral” to endorse his personal philosophy that the present is all that matters. In doing so, he inadvertently offers Betty a bit of cautionary insight: dwelling on the past and mourning the brevity of time spent with someone is futile. The duration of something's existence has no bearing on its significance, as even the most fleeting experiences have the potential to become a part of our lives forever. 

Mike's Murder's Queer aesthetic, I feel, is tethered to the film's unconventional spin on the mystery genre and on its on-the-fringes perspective. Though critics and audiences at the time were annoyed to distraction by it, I liked that Bridges used the titular murder as a catalyst for exploring themes of urban alienation rather than as the typical mystery device. 

Cinematographer Reynaldo Villalobos supports this by establishing a visual motif wherein much of Mike’s Murder is shot in confined, tightly framed close-ups that convey the sense of its characters—who speed past one other in cars, conduct business from their vehicles (Betty’s job is in one of those hermetically sealed-looking drive-in banks), communicate via phones and answering machines, and peer at one another through cameras and videotape recorders—rarely ever touch and always seem to be alone…even when they’re together. 

Barriers and Separation

The look of Mike’s Murder so fits the story at hand that it almost acts as the visual equivalent of those noir voice-over narrations, drawing attention to the fact that the lens through which Bridges sees the world of Mike’s Murder is so personal that it borders on cinéma vérité. Indeed, Mike’s Murder is easily the most recognizably lived-in, truthfully-realized vision of Los Angeles in the ‘80s I’ve ever seen (rare in movies, even the driving scenes are geographically accurate!) 

This personal touch stamp extends beyond the film’s appearance, as Mike’s Murder finds Bridges—who, like Winfield, was openly gay in his private life but professionally closeted—taking his boldest step forward in integrating his personal life into his professional work. While the homoerotic gaze has long been a hidden-in-plain-sight attribute of several of James Bridges’ movies, Mike’s Murder is the first film by the director to include an entirely out gay character.

September 30, 1955 (1977)

Dennis Christopher (right) played a queer-coded supporting character in Bridges’ semi-autobiographical September 30, 1955 (the date actor James Dean died). The character that Bridges based on himself—the James Dean-obsessed Jimmy J, played by Richard Thomas—is depicted as straight. (Though a case could be made that the character is, like perhaps Bridges at that age, questioning.) 

Of all the films in Bridges’ abbreviated filmography (he made only eight movies in his career), Mike’s Murder is my absolute, hands-down favorite. And I say this knowing that the version I fell in love with isn’t the director’s original vision, but one whose tonal shifts and inconsistent, alternating points of view betray the battle scars of a year’s worth of edits, reshoots, retooling, and tinkering following a legendarily disastrous preview screening. 

Initially slated for a spring 1983 release, Mike’s Murder was sneak-previewed in January 1983 at two Bay Area theaters. Audience response was overwhelmingly negative. Bridges spent a year making changes—much of it funded personally—to address the most frequently criticized elements: the explicit violence and the nonlinear narrative. The revised Mike’s Murder premiered in Los Angeles on Friday, March 16, 1984, at the Vogue Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. 

It always rang false to me when Bridges, in damage-control, PR-speak interviews about the revamped Mike’s Murder, claimed, “This is a better picture than it was.

Mainly because I grew up in the Bay Area and knew that the locations chosen to preview Mike's Murder were two of the most white-bread, conservative suburban enclaves you could find. In short: the audience comprised precisely the demographic least likely to be receptive to—especially in the homophobic, Reagan '80s—a movie as artistically unorthodox and sexually transgressive as Mike’s Murder.

If Bridges hoped to salvage Mike’s Murder by restructuring it to appeal to THIS demographic, you’ll never convince me that his edits made the film "better"—only that they made it less “upsetting” to the multiplex set. The extreme form of hostility expressed at the previews (accounts cite booing, yelling, laughter, walkouts) doesn’t describe the reactions of people bored or confused by a movie. It’s how people react when they’re affronted.

Being as passionate about this film as I am, it's kind of torture to watch the
 theatrical trailer because it’s made up almost entirely of scenes no longer in the film.
Link to the TRAILER 

“Date night” preview audiences expecting another standard thriller from the director of The China Syndrome, or hoping Winger—by now typed in the public’s eye as a romantic ingénue thanks to Urban Cowboy and An Officer and a Gentleman—to be swept off by the leading man in the final reel, must have gone into apoplexy when confronted with Mike’s Murder’s blunt Queerness (a line from the original cut had Winfield telling Winger about his first encounter with Mike, “Before I knew it, he was in my arms, and my cock was up his ass...”); unfiltered sexuality (the original version of the phone sex scene was said to have made audiences particularly uncomfortable); liberal politics (a critique of the hypocrisy of the Moral Majority); and explicit violence attached to the kind of racial “optics”  (Mike’s retribution murder is carried out by two Black men) apt to trigger both white fragility and claims of racism.

Brooke Anderson as Patty

It could be said that Mike's Murder is something of a casualty of James Bridges' fame. After The China Syndrome and Urban Cowboy, he was seen as a high-profile director of mainstream motion pictures.  Mike's Murder—which I always thought was too personal and niche a film to ever appeal to a broad audience—was a small film, an art film, if you will, that should have been pitched to that market.

Since the reedited version of Mike’s Murder ultimately flopped as resoundingly as the original was likely to do, it’s a shame that Bridges’ original vision, flaws and all, wasn’t what was released. 

In Mike's Murder, photographs serve as symbols of the attempt to hold onto that which is impermanent, so I have always had a soft spot for this striking, discarded poster artwork, which evokes a still from a photographer's contact sheet with a red greasepencil edit mark foreshadowing Mike's bloody erasure. Fortunately, composer Joe Jackson, compelled to release his album of songs written for the soundtrack early due to the film's changing release schedule, kept the image for his album cover.

William Ostander as Randy

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

One of the great things about Mike’s Murder is that it doesn’t neatly fit into any specific film genre or category. Except one.

Independent of what it was intended to be, meant to express, or how it came to be perceived, looking at it now, Mike’s Murder resonates with me most persuasively and forcefully as an underappreciated work of Queer Cinema. It’s a gay art film, with —if not inauthentically, then perhaps non-essentially—a centered heteronormative perspective. Kind of like a post-Gay-Lib/AIDS-Epidemic-Era throwback to the days when queer artists (Inge, Williams, Capote), prohibited from telling their stories honestly, had to resort to filtering their truths through heterosexual surrogates—most often female characters.

"(Mike) loved having his picture taken. He was impatient
and liked to see the results immediately."

From camera angles foregrounding Mark Keyloun’s rather splendiferous butt, to the introduction of Paul Winfield’s character in a semi-nude state, and the notably extended (and welcome) screen time allocated to the half-dressed muscular physique of wannabe Chippendales dancer Randy (William Ostrander, making a lot of a mysteriously-written role), the eroticized gay gaze in Mike’s Murder feels both thematically relevant and boldly subversive in a mainstream film.

"He talked about you all the time."

Each time I watch Mike’s Murder, I’m hit over the head with the conspicuous truth that, for me, the film’s real story, most interesting relationship, and most genuine narrative arc exploring the themes of love and loss in LA, is between Mike and Phillip, not Mike and Betty. 

Phillip’s entrance in the film arrives at a point when the viewer is desperately in need of a clear-eyed, unfiltered sense of who the mask-wearing Mike truly was, and the character of Phillip, middle-aged, sophisticated, and a little world-weary, provides that.

And thanks to the effortless gravitas of Paul Winfield’s performance, Betty's discovery that the one person who really knew Mike—who picked him up in Ohio and paid for his first-class flight to LA...who both knew and loved the sides of him she never saw—happens to be a man, elevates the film’s emotional depth and tension in a way I wanted to see more of. 

Robert Crosson as Sam Morris
A lonely photographer with a paternalistic streak
 whose affection for Mike is channeled into a voyeuristic preoccupation

When the Betty character isn’t coming across like a lone female tourist lost in an androcentric world of drug dealers, Sugar Daddies, father figures, and the opportunistically sexually-fluid young men who love and/or use them; from a strictly neo-noir angle, I do like that her character feels like a (intentional?)  genre callback to the Dana Andrews role in Otto Preminger’s 1944 film noir, Laura.

In that film, a detective falls in love with the dead woman whose murder he’s investigating, and I think something like that is what happens to Betty. 

It’s left up to individual interpretation whether one thinks Betty is in love with Mike at the start of the film (my take is that she only thinks she is). The tragedy is that she only ever “meets” the real Mike after his death. At the end, when she’s at her piano, and we hear that she has had that out-of-tune C-scale fixed, I think Betty has indeed fallen in love with Mike. And is slowly learning how to let him go.

No matter how many times I see it, Winger always wrings the waterworks out of me during this scene. She is SO, good. I can't imagine that the character of Betty, a completely average woman, looked like much of a role on the page, but Winger inhabits her and gives her an inner life we can see play across her face.

Even in those moments when I wish for a version of Mike's Murder that was less hetero-centric, I can never get past the personal reality that less of Debra Winger is anything is just simply not a good idea.

NO ONE IS INNOCENT

Comparative allusions to Preminger’s Laura and Mike’s Murder don’t stop with Winger’s role, but extend most pointedly to the way the titular characters in both are these dominant figures whose presences are felt throughout the entirety of the film. Influencing the action, whether or not they are onscreen, whether or not they are alive.  

As embodied by the ideally cast Mark Keyloun, Mike Chuhutsky (I love that name. As one reviewer observed, it stands out as the last remnant of his true self; the part of himself he hadn’t yet got around to changing), like all good hustlers, has that complacently nebulous, passive/assertive, all-things-to-all-people quality that makes him the perfect blank screen upon which others can project exactly what they want and need. He can look like an innocent, he can look like a criminal.

Hustler White

“A confused kid who sold a few drugs to pay his rent.” 

Themes related to privilege and the presumption of white innocence emerge provocatively and ambiguously—vacillating somewhere between critique and perpetuation—in the “reckless boys making bad decisions” tone of the scenes showing Mike and his twitchy friend Pete (an excellent Darrell Larson) engaging in criminal activity. 

Physical contrasts—sharky city boy Pete next to cherubic Midwest cornpone Mike—invite audiences to ascribe a naïve blamelessness to Mike. Yet simultaneously, there’s a well-observed undercurrent of personal accountability proffered in the (evenhandedly accurate) depiction of Mike and Pete as the type of guys who, despite untrustworthiness, bad faith, and a tendency to exploit an advantage being characteristic of so many of their interactions with others, are nevertheless entirely uncomprehending of the fact that their actions can have consequences. 

A darkly compelling (and often heartbreaking) look at love, loss, and loneliness in the city of missed connections, Mike's Murder is a more-than-worthy addition to the canon of Los Angeles neo-noirs. It's a film that deserves reevaluation. Better still, Mike's Murder is a film that needs to have its original cut restored. 

Life partners James Bridges (who started out as an actor) and Jack Larson (associate producer of Mike's Murder and, of course, TV's Jimmy Olsen of The Adventures of Superman) met when both appeared in the film Johnny Trouble (1957). Bridges passed away in 1993, Larson in 2015

I once described Albert Finney as a movie star with the heart of a character actor. I think James Bridges was a mainstream filmmaker with the heart of a Queer Cinema auteur. And the two worlds come together magnificently in Mike’s Murder, James Bridges' most authentically personal film. 

Clip from Mike's Murder (1984)

BONUS MATERIAL

When I mentioned earlier that Debra Winger’s character drives a cool car, it’s because the moment I saw her driving that silver VW Rabbit convertible in Mike's Murder, I went ga-ga over it. My first VW Rabbit, purchased in the '90s was red, but in 2000, I got the silver model that had always obsessed me.  

I actually had the opportunity to observe James Bridges and Jack Larson at work when, about five months after seeing Mike’s Murder, I got a job as a dance extra in Bridges’ next film, Perfect (1985). Filming took place over seven days at the end of summer at the Sports Connection fitness center in West Hollywood. True to the Hollywood axiom, nobody knows they're making a bomb until it detonates.

Debra Winger signed my Black Widow poster: 
"To Ken, my favorite guy to move with" 

In the mid-‘90s, I worked in Santa Monica as a dance instructor and fitness trainer, and for a brief time, I had the “Somebody pinch me!” thrill of having Debra Winger as a client. I couldn't believe my luck, and it took every ounce of professionalism I had not to go completely fanboy over her on our first meetup. She relayed to me that she selected my class because she couldn’t stand “perky” (my class demeanor was not dissimilar to that of Louis Gossett Jr. in An Officer and a Gentleman). She's such a sweetheart, and I had (have) such a crush. 

The real-life case that inspired Mike’s Murder was the stabbing death of Mark Bernolak in his apartment in Brentwood on October 12, 1980. Bernolak, a former lover of Paul Winfield and an acquaintance of Bridges and Larson, was a part-time tennis instructor who also dealt drugs while trying to get work behind the scenes in films. 

IMDB lists him as an assistant on the 1979 The Who documentary The Kids Are Alright, and a university archive has seven photos Bernolak took of author Christopher Isherwood and his partner, artist Don Bachardy (both friends of Larson and Bridges). The details surrounding the actual case are tragic and a bit dodgy, but far less sensational than what Mike’s Murder depicts (Those interested can Google: Mark Bernolak and UCLA football). 

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 - 2025

HELLO, DOLLY! 1969

Hello, Dolly!, indeed.

I’ve wanted to write about this movie since I started this blog way back in 2009.

The only thing preventing me was the promise I’d then made to myself—in response to what felt like (in the days of IMDb’s message boards and forums) a pervasive trend toward negativity and combativeness in online film writing and discourse—that I would devote this retro movie blog exclusively to the films I loved and admired most.  

And when it comes to Hello, Dolly! ...well, let's just say my relationship with it is complicated.

Barbra Streisand as Dolly Levi

Walter Matthau as Horace Vandergelder

Michael Crawford as Cornelius Hackl

Marianne McAndrew as Irene Molloy

Danny Lockin as Barnaby Tucker

E. J. (Edra Jean) Peaker as Minnie Fay

Louis Armstrong as Louis, the Orchestra Leader

Hello, Dolly! is the much-hyped, megamillion-dollar 1969 screen adaptation of that enduring, now-classic 1964 Tony Award-winning musical (with the annoying exclamation point) about a meddlesome matchmaker from Yonkers who sets her personal matrimonial sights on a curmudgeonly, wealthy client. I’m old enough to have seen Hello, Dolly! when it was released in December of 1969, but not being much of a Streisand fan at the time (that changed with 1972’s What’s Up, Doc?) I foolishly backed out of every opportunity to see it. 

That was the winter when I, a precocious, self-serious, hormonal adolescent, was busy spending my weekends and most of my allowance money going to see Easy Rider, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Midnight Cowboy, and The Sterile Cuckoo...over and over again. The last thing I was interested in was seeing anything rated “G.” Much less a G-rated thing that sang and danced.

Of course, now I could kick myself for not having given up at least one weekend of “Suggested for Mature Audiences” nihilism for the chance to experience the opulent excesses Hello, Dolly! on the big screen. More’s the pity because I just know that impressionable, 12-year-old me would have gone utterly gaga over the whole "event" spectacle that is Hello, Dolly! 

If anyone can upstage 4,000 extras, it's Barbra Streisand

I absolutely live for that moment in “Before the Parade Passes By” when Streisand, arms aloft, striding toward the camera, flanked on both sides by a red-jacketed marching band, brings herself to a theatrical halt to end all theatrical halts, dropping her arms and that big ol’ hat, grounding herself like a rocket before liftoff, then lets fly with that voice that soars to the heavens and shattering all the artificiality around her. It’s a genuine “goosebump moment” in a film with all too few. 

My family lived in San Francisco in 1969, and Hello, Dolly! played in movie theaters for at least a year after its exclusive, reserved-seat, $ 4.50-a-ticket roadshow engagement ended (at which time it became available at “popular prices” in neighborhood theaters on weird-ass double bills with The Battle of Britain or The Kremlin Letter, of all things). But I didn’t get around to seeing Hello, Dolly! until 1974…when it was broadcast on TV, in cropped format, with commercials, on our family’s ginormous living room console. Not the most advantageous of circumstances under which to see my first Barbra Streisand musical, to be sure, but at least by this time, I was an interested party.

Hello, Dolly! had its broadcast TV premiere on Thursday, February 28, 1974. I’m not sure why CBS thought scheduling a 3-hour special movie event on a non-holiday weeknight was a good idea (I was exhausted in school the next day). Maybe timing was a factor: earlier that week, the 1973 Academy Award nominations were announced, and Streisand was up for Best Actress for The Way We Were. 

So… what were my first impressions of Hello Dolly!? 

(1) Well, I loved Jerry Herman’s tuneful score (although the beautifully sung, written-for-the-screen ballad [a.k.a., shameless Oscar-nomination bid] “Love is Only Love” was, is, and will forever remain for me, a total slog). 

(2) I enjoyed Michael Kidd’s strenuous “The word I think I’d use is athletic” choreography. 

(3) And although Barbra Streisand’s Dolly Levi makes not a lick of sense to me in the context of the story and casting—I’m supposed to believe this young, glamorous, sexy, and vivacious firecracker of a woman is wasting her time meddling in the love lives of four vapid virgins and one grumpy old man?—I was nevertheless utterly charmed and entranced by her. 

The movie itself…not so much.

As Hello, Dolly! is set in 1860, I've selected a quote from a 19th-century author (re: drawing-room entertainments of the day) that cannily echoes my thoughts on seeing it for the first time. 

If You Ain't Got Elegance
"All is forced, coarse, heavy. The jokes are like cannon-balls, smashing everything in their passage.
 No wit, nothing natural, no sprightliness, no elegance."  

Guy de Maupassant - The Moustache 1883

As I said, perhaps television wasn't the best showcase for a film of this scale, and likely influenced at least a part of my initial response to Hello Dolly!  

For example, the film's lack of visual distinction (all static shots and overlit sets) was ill-served when subjected to the then-standard practice of cropping the edges of wide-screen movies to better fit the square TV screen. The sight of blandly colorless dancers with fixed, joyless smiles leaping about with mechanical precision in a New York set that, in the minimalized format of television, resembled nothing so much as Disneyland’s Main Street; didn’t scream "$25 million movie musical" so much as suggest a “The Doodletown Pipers Meet The Ernie Flatt Dancers"  TV variety special.

While singing groups like The Doodletown Pipers and Up With People always gave off "cult" vibes to me, their popularity during the "let it all hang out" Sixties reflected a market for aggressively wholesome, MOR entertainment. Hello Dolly!, pitching itself as the family-friendly alternative to the saturated R and X-rated market of the New Hollywood, emerged as one of the top 5 highest-grossing films of 1969/70. (But, due to its hefty production and marketing budget, still wound up losing 20th Century Fox [depending on the source] in the neighborhood of 10 to 30 million dollars.)

The widow Levi serving up a little wholesome, G-rated sex appeal

Given my penchant for falling in love with waaaaay less-than-perfect movies, none of the above-stated would have factored significantly in my feelings for Hello, Dolly! had I just felt something…ANYTHING…for the characters or the story. Outside of the allure of Dolly’s fin de siècle fabulousness, I had no love story to root for and no investment in anything that was going on. By the film’s two-hour mark, I found myself wishing Ambrose and Barnaby would run off together and that Dolly would hook up with one of the Harmonia Garden waiters. 

In the end, I was so disappointed that so much money, talent, and obvious hard work hadn’t resulted in a movie that was more fun. Or even funny.

Coke Eyes and Gaping Maws
No small part of my annoyance with Hello Dolly! is Michael Crawford's creative decision to convey boyish American enthusiasm by imitating a largemouth bass. Similarly, director Gene Kelly has the cast adopt an acting style of contrived naivete that's all cartoonish "takes" and eyes held open so wide that everyone looks like they've just taken a bump 

Despite my complaints and primarily due to the immense pleasure I derive from Streisand's The Three Faces of Eve take on the character of Dolly Levi (she's Mae West! She's Fanny Brice! She's a drag queen!...the fun to be had is in never knowing from scene to scene which Dolly is going to show up), I've always owned a copy of Hello, Dolly! and watched it countless times over the years. Usually à la carte...with the TV remote at the ready, finger poised over the "fast-forward" button. 

So, how does a lifelong cinephile and movie musical lover reconcile himself to this paradox? Well, you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, and there you have: Hello Dolly!…a film for which I’ve never fully resolved my love/hate feelings. (Thank you, Al Burton, Gloria Loring, and Alan Thicke.)

Until now. 

The way Dolly sexily grinds her hips against Horace in "So Long, Dearie" convinces me her matrimonial gameplan is to induce a honeymoon heart attack and go on living happily solo on the old man's half-a-million 

Ironically, the one thing that got me to stop evaluating Hello, Dolly! exclusively through the prism of unrealized potential—putting me on the path toward appreciating the film, warts and all, for what it is—was my late-to-the-party discovery of The Matchmaker (1958), the screen adaptation of the 1954 Thornton Wilder Broadway play that inspired Hello, Dolly! 

The Matchmaker Cast: Shirley Booth, Shirley Maclaine, Paul Ford, Anthony Perkins, and Robert Morse

One of the smartest decisions screenwriter John Michael Hayes (Rear Window, The Children's Hour) made in adapting The Matchmaker to the screen was to dump the superfluous characters of  Ambrose and Ermingarde. If only Hello, Dolly! had done the same

I had never even heard of The Matchmaker before seeing it on TCM sometime in 2001, but it instantly won me over with its abundance of heart, humor, engaging performances, and genuinely sweet-natured charm. The very things I’d always felt were missing in action from Hello, Dolly!. I initially thought that my falling in love with a practically-perfect-in-every-way adaptation of Wilder’s story would only amplify my dissatisfaction with Hello, Dolly!, but to my surprise, it had the opposite effect.

 

Finally seeing Thornton Wilder’s frothy farce presented on a scale appropriate to its slim plot and humble characters led me to conclude that perhaps part of my issue with Hello, Dolly! might stem from evaluating it by motion picture standards when it’s really not a movie at all; it’s a monument.

An eager-to-please, pull-out-the-stops, Barnum and Bailey Circus of a monument erected to commemorate and pay tribute to the institution that is Hello, Dolly!...a show that, at the time, was one of the most lauded (10 Tony Awards), lucrative, and long-running musicals in Broadway history.

Suspended in Time 
The movie I once dismissed as the kind of musical Hollywood needed to stop making, I now appreciate as a last-gasp souvenir of a style and type of Hollywood filmmaking that is gone forever 

Thinking of Hello, Dolly! this way has gradually turned me into a more appreciative audience. I once felt the film’s chief liability was its dogged devotion to the proved-to-be-fatal Hollywood dictum that bigger, busier, noisier, and more expensive was ALWAYS better. Now, simply because these qualities affix Hello, Dolly! squarely in a specific time and place in Hollywood history—the sets, costumes, production numbers, and sheer spectacle of it all shine brighter for me than they ever did. 

On Feb. 29, 1968, a month before Hello, Dolly! began filming (and nine months after Streisand's casting), Carol Channing not-so-subtly thumbed her nose at 20th Century Fox while giving America a glimpse of what it stood to miss in the way of comedy chemistry by having Walter Matthau guest on her TV special. 

As Broadway’s first singing Dolly (from 1964-1967), Carol Channing was so affectionately identified with the role that the casting of anyone else in the film version was bound to be controversial no matter who it was. But when news broke that the Hollywood parade had passed by 46-year-old Channing in favor of 25-year-old, hot-as-a-fuse Barbra Streisand—the very person Channing had beat out for Best Actress at the 1964 Tony Awards (Channing won for Hello, Dolly! against Streisand in Funny Girl)—the outcry over perceived miscasting turned it into a cause célèbre that raged unabated for over a year.

 

Billboard - May 9, 1964

Hello, Dolly! has often been dismissed as a "one-song musical" by critics. But when it comes to that one song, no one is more responsible for its widespread recognition and success than Louis Armstrong. His 1964 recording won Grammys for Best Song and Best Male Performance and gave the 62-year-old jazz legend his first and only #1 hit, famously dethroning The Beatles. I’ve always thought of Armstrong’s brief guest appearance in Hello Dolly! as one of the film’s few moments of magic. It’s the only moment in the entire film when Streisand looks relaxed and genuinely happy.

GOOD GOLLY, MISS DOLLY or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

If part of my making peace with Hello, Dolly! means accepting that my heart will be on a bit of a starvation diet, I take comfort in knowing that—thanks to the modern innovations of Blu-ray, restoration, widescreen HD television, and impeccable digital audio—my eyes, ears, and nervous system will be treated to a veritable feast. Watching the title song production number and the breathtaking "Waiter's Gallop," I found myself feeling for the first time a sense of gratitude that Hello, Dolly! is such an overinflated totem of studio-era excess.

PERFORMANCES 

Time has made the supporting cast of Hello, Dolly! less of an irritation to me (they're all so young, they're kind of cute now). Walter Matthau will ever be a favorite, his reactions and line deliveries being the source of many of the film's meager laughs: "Any man who comes to the city deserves what happens to him." 

But I've often wondered if the creators of Hello, Dolly! didn’t fully recognize what a screen presence powerhouse they had in Barbra Streisand (Funny Girl hadn’t yet been released when "Dolly" went into production); otherwise, it's hard to understand why they didn’t see it as a problem that her character is offscreen for so long. The stage show is built to give an older actress lots of rest…but when you’re fortunate enough to have Streisand in a musical, do you really want to give so much screen time over to those dull ingenues and juveniles?   

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

"I thought she did the BEST job she could do."
 - Carol Channing's slightly shady appraisal - Dec. 29, 1969 

Perhaps because I don't think of Hello, Dolly! as a "great" musical in the first place (ergo, impervious to being "ruined" in any significant way), I don't have any problem with the built-in contradiction of my thinking Barbra Streisand is most definitely miscast as Dolly, yet I find her to be ideal as a musical comedy star.  There's just no way I'd ever be disappointed to have one of the preeminent entertainers of my generation showcased in a vehicle like this. As unpleasant an experience as it was for Streisand in the making (as detailed in her EPIC memoir), I will be forever grateful that it exists. Streisand's not perfect in it...but in many ways, she's better than perfect, she's exquisite.

Hello, Dolly! is over 55 years old. Barbra Streisand is over 80. And I’m somewhere there in between. Sure, Hello, Dolly!, much like myself on certain mornings, can be lumbering and stiff. But just as I’ve found peace in not focusing on my aches and pains and learned to simply celebrate the fact that I’m still here, I'm glad—after so many years of back and forth—I can at last accord Dolly Levi a similar grace. 

BONUS MATERIAL:

Gene Kelly puts his handprints in cement in the forecourt of Hollywood’s Grauman’s Chinese Theater on November 24, 1969, just prior to Hello Dolly!’s December 16th West Coast premiere.

The young ladies behind him are the stars of Fox's forthcoming X-rated release Beyond the Valley of the Dolls - Marcia McBroom and Cynthia Myers in Irene Sharaff-designed costumes from Hello, Dolly!. 

During the '90s I worked for a time as Walter Matthau's personal trainer. After taking months to win over his confidence, he was finally comfortable enough with me to share some anecdotes about the making of "Dolly" after I begged to know the details. Without going into it, let me just say that in having heard the exact same story Streisand relates in her memoir more than 20 years before she wrote it, the talk about their not getting along during the filming is true (his recounting of the rude comment he made to her was accompanied by a surprisingly spot-on Streisand impersonation), as is the fact that they became good friends...or at least friendly...later. 

The hemlines of women's skirts fluctuated rapidly in the 1960s, but it's got nothing on the 1890s, as evidenced by these screencaps of the "Dancing" sequence, showing Minnie Fay's dress growing shorter by the second.  

Barnaby Tucker and Minnie Fay

Two-time Tony Award winner Robert Morse made his Broadway debut at 24, originating the role of Barnaby Tucker in The Matchmaker, later reprising his performance in the film. In 1968, Morse co-starred with E.J. Peaker (24 when she made her screen debut in Hello, Dolly!) in the musical sitcom That's Life, which ran for a single season on ABC. 

Richard Amsel, one of my all-time favorite illustrators, was just 21 and a recent art school graduate when his submission for 20th Century Fox's nationwide talent contest (to design a poster for Hello, Dolly!) was selected, launching his brief but prolific career. His iconic artwork for the Hello, Dolly! poster is noted for the era-specific, Boomer-recognizable Spirograph-style design of the flowers adorning Mrs. Levi's enormous hat.

Streisand & Matthau in a clip from Hello, Dolly!

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2024