STAR! 1968

"Crickey! I'm tired of playing bloody virgins." - Julie Andrews 1967

When music icon Debbie Harry was asked in a 2019 interview if she would be interested in seeing her life and the legacy of Blondie turned into a musical biopic, she responded: “I’m not so sure that I’m terribly fond of them. The way the industry works and the way the artist works within the industry, it’s all very similar. The only thing that’s different is the personality of the artist. It’s basically the same old story, only with different performers, different faces.”

Ms. Harry nailed it. Whether set in the worlds of music, movies, or theater, biographical films--no matter how creatively envisioned--suffer from an elemental sameness. A formulaic, 3-Act cycle of “rags-riches-rundown-redemption” that may make it easy for Hollywood to keep reselling the same product with different packaging, but encourages the production of films whose only distinction is budget size and the degree of talent, dynamism, and charisma of the particular performer tasked with the job of being the celebrity impersonator. 

Seeing Double

Los Angeles, October 1968: Julie Andrews & Hollywood newbie Barbra Streisand were the Doublemint Twins of Roadshow musicals. Star! the eagerly-anticipated musical about the life of English Music Hall star Gertrude Lawrence, opened just three weeks after the premiere of Funny Girl, the equally anticipated biopic about Broadway star Fanny Brice. The similar films employed the same flashback framing device, each leading lady seated in a theater, looking back over her life. (Note La Streisand's positively lethal nails.)

Funny Girl and Star! shared near-identical scenes depicting a theater neophyte “comically” bungling an ensemble number; winning over an audience with a dazzling solo; routinely bumping heads with a stern but avuncular employer; and, de rigueur of the genre, suffering for love in mink. Where these two films diverge is that its stars at the time were on very opposite career paths: Streisand seeking to establish a screen persona, Andrews hoping to shed one. This proved to be the difference that made all difference.

Dame Julie Andrews as Gertrude Lawrence

Daniel Massey as Noel Coward

I adore Julie Andrews, yet I’m something of a Johnny-come-lately where her films are concerned. The first Julie Andrews movie I ever saw was Thoroughly Modern Millie in 1967 when I was 10-years-old, and I never saw another until 10 (which I loathed) in 1979. I was in my 40s when I got around to seeing Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music was unseen until 2015, and Star! only a few years before that.

I'm aware that my lifetime aversion to movies branded "clean" or "wholesome" is what kept me away from Andrews' two most iconic films, which is a pity, for they are both marvelous films I would have loved as a child. However, Star!--an overstuffed musical "sure-fire hit" that wound up one of Hollywood's more legendary "crash and burn disasters" (I'm looking at you, Mame and Cats)--is just the kind of elephantine entertainment that would seem to be right up my aesthetic alley.

Andrews, Bruce Forsythe, and Beryl Reid sing the popular 1921 Music Hall song "Piccadilly"

Discounting my usual complaint about overemphatic musical titles (those exclamation points!), I like to think I approached Star! with an open mind. But I gotta say, things got off to a very rocky start when this $14 million, spare no expense, travel the globe for locations musical epic hit me over the head with its “Fox contract player” casting vibe. Throughout the film, in scenes meant to be taking place in London & Paris, up pop familiar American TV faces like Eugene Roche (Mr. Ajax dish detergent) and Cathleen Cordell (stalwart of episodic TV) to break the illusion. 

Some 15 minutes into the movie there’s a scene set in a meticulously re-created British Music Hall, but verisimilitude flies straight out the window the second I recognize the cockney drunk harassing a young Gertrude Lawrence to be the same drunk who harasses Darrin Stephens in every episode of Bewitched set in a bar: none other than TV's Charmin-pusher, Mr. Whipple, aka character actor Dick Wilson.

Filmed on location in New York, London, and the French Riviera!
Well, you're just going to have to take the publicist's word for it, because between the rear-projection shots, obvious backdrops, and interiors so brightly lit they look like sound stages, it's pretty hard to believe Star! ever left L.A.  

Then there are the two Parisian theater/cabaret impresarios played by American actors (Alan Oppenheim and Richard Angarola) chipping away at my already overtasked suspension of disbelief by speaking with cartoon French accents. Indeed, fans of Valley of the Dolls will recognize Angarola as Mr. Chardot, Sharon Tate’s, sleazy French "art film" director with the Pepé Le Pew intonation.

Hitting perhaps the hardest is the lineup of actors cast as glamorous Gertrude Lawrence's paramours. Looking over this bunch, my best guess is that in order for a family film to legitimize its leading lady juggling multiple lovers without benefit of marriage, they sought to cast leading men guaranteed to drive thoughts of sex out of anyone's mind on sight.

Richard Crenna, Anthony Eisley, Michael Craig, and Robert Reed
If it was STAR!'s intention to generate sympathy for Gertrude Lawrence by presenting her as a woman cursed with attracting only the blandest, dullest suitors from several continents, it succeeded beyond all reasonable expectation

When production on The Sound of Music wrapped in 1964, Julie Andrews agreed to reteam with director Robert Wise and producer Saul Chaplin on a film about the life of Gertrude Lawrence. In the years before production began on Star!, Andrews completed three films (Torn Curtain, Hawaii, and Thoroughly Modern Millie), and most significantly, her fourth, The Sound of Music had become a global cash-cow, cultural phenomenon, and 20th Century-Fox savior.

I have no idea how the Gertrude Lawrence biopic was originally envisioned in 1964, but by the time it morphed into the musical reunion of the creative team responsible for the then highest-grossing motion picture in history, I suspect it outgrew itself.

"I don't know, but somewhere along the line, 'Shrinking Violet' got Sanforized" - Lucy Ricardo

Costing nearly twice as much as The Sound of Music with less than a third of its plot and none of its warmth or humor, Star! is a gargantuan production for no other reason than Julie Andrews was the #1 box-office star and The Sound of Music had made a mint.

Like many, I knew next to nothing about Gertrude Lawrence before seeing Star!, but years of reading show business memoirs and seeing movie biopics with "Story" tacked on the end (The Helen Morgan Story, The Eddy Duchin Story, etc.) resulted in a nagging sense of déjà vu from Star!'s depiction of Lawrence as a willful, ambitious girl from humble beginnings who achieves great fame as an actress, only to find happiness elusive because her professional desire to be “lots of different people" leaves her not knowing who she is or what she wants. 

Presented as a series of episodic, tangentially-connected highlights and lowlights interspersed between splashy musical numbers, the essentially unremarkable events of Lawrence’s life story (at least as presented here) left me wondering how in the world anyone thought $14 million and three hours were necessary to tell it.

Of STAR!'s seven Oscar nominations (0 wins), Daniel Massey was deservedly singled out for the film's sole nomination in the performing categories. He also won the Golden Globe, for which Andrews was also nominated.

Perhaps criticizing the film’s script for being superficial, its characters undeveloped, its supporting cast serviceable, and production old-fashioned is quibbling. Star! was never really selling Gertrude Lawrence in the first place. As implied by the movie posters declaring “Julie Andrews as The Star!”, Julie Andrews—her singing, her dancing, her wigs, and her costumes (by Donald Brooks)—was the whole show. And I have to say, as a showcase for a sumptuously glamorized Andrews in all her singing and dancing glory, Star! is an outstanding film record that I'm overjoyed exists. 

Andrews is in exceptionally fine voice and is clearly working her ass off. And rather than revisiting the tried-and-true, she's taking a genuine creative risk. I applaud actors (especially those labeled "stars") who try to spread their creative wings. Too many bad films have been made and far too many exciting talents dulled by surrendering to typecasting, going for the easy money, and pandering to fanbases obsessed with a star's “image.” 

While some newspaper ads heralded, "Julie Andrews is a different Julie Andrews in STAR!" others promised, "Julie Andrews as you love her!"--whatever that meant. As it turns out, she was neither and both. Consequently, STAR!, like Gertrude Lawrence's character in the Broadway musical Lady in the Dark, suffered from not being able to make up its mind. 

Although the sincerity of her effort shows (which may be part of the problem), with reluctance I have to say I never found Andrews convincing for a moment as Gertrude Lawrence (1968 Maggie Smith would have been ideal). A reluctant observation because I really do like Julie Andrews SO much and think, in addition to being very talented, she is and always has been a humble and gracious class act and charming personality. 

But for an actress who mostly radiates crisp efficiency and common sense to make real a character charitably described as an ill-tempered, hard-drinking, child-neglecting narcissist, Andrews needed the kind of special handling and solid material Doris Day received with Love Me or Leave Me, or Mary Tyler Moore with Ordinary People. Certainly something better than William Fairchild’s fatuous screenplay or Robert Wise's famously hands-off direction. Outside of its Michael Kidd choreographed and staged musical numbers, overall I feel Julie Andrews is poorly served by Star!, not the other way around. 

14-year-old Jenny Agutter (Logan's Run, Walkabout) as Gertrude's daughter Pamela Roper

As movie musicals evolve (de-evolve?) into pyrotechnical CGI displays of machine-gun editing and flying camerawork, an old-school, studio-bound movie like Star! is not without its pleasures. I knew when I first saw it that Star! was going to be a film I’d add to my collection and rewatch...but likely never again in its entirety. And I was right...Star! has joined The Music Man, Paint Your Wagon, Nine, A Chorus Line, and Rent as one of my movie musical “Fast-Forward Favorites.”

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE  -  The Musical Sequences  

My “Fast-Forward Favorites” are movies I visit most often with my finger poised over the FWD button on the remote so I can sidestep the unpleasantness and hone in exclusively on the joys. In nearly every film I place in this category, this means the musical numbers (George Cukor's The Women is one of the few non-musical films I most enjoy a la carte). The musical sequences in Star! hold a special sway over me because I fell in love with the movie's original soundtrack album long before I ever saw the film. I was a freshman in high school when I purchased the deluxe, photo-crammed, gate-fold Star! soundtrack LP for 99¢ in a remainder bin. It’s an absolutely brilliant song collection and I played it to death (still do) because it’s essentially a Julie Andrews concert album in disguise.

The use of music is where Star! differs from its 1968 look-alike Funny Girl. In Star!, like Cabaret, only four years earlier, all the songs and dances take place onstage or are sung in realistic performance. For the longest time, the discordant tone of the screenplay left me with the impression that the musical numbers in the film were unconnected to the action and that each time Dame Andrews breaks into song, the already overextended story grinds to a halt. But in rewatching the film in recent years and for this piece, I now see that most every song actually comments on the action or relates to Lawrence’s romantic and psychological conflicts. It's just that with the film's unwieldy structure, that particular thread isn't all that easy to find. 

Favorite Musical Sequences 

Dear Little Boy (Dear Little Girl)

Ironic as hell that my top fave musical moment in this Herculean production is Julie Andrews just standing still and singing with that bell-clear voice of hers. Star! was my introduction to many of the standards and showtunes in the score, and this Gershwin song from 1926's Oh, Kay! (those damned exclamation points, again) is lovely.

Burlington Bertie from Bow

I’m no fan of clowns, baggy-pants comics, or those maudlin, cured-ham vaudeville-burlesque hobo “swells” like Red Skelton’s Freddie the Freeloader...but this number is a keeper. The song itself is a witty delight and Andrews handles the many props and comic stage business with waggish aplomb. She often refers to it as the most challenging number she's ever had to learn.

The Physician

I love this clever Cole Porter tune so much, and the comical staging it's given really soars in spite of the cringe-inducing brownface adopted by the performers (the less said about that “Limehouse Blues” number, the better). I’ve heard this song interpreted by many people over the years, but Andrews' rendition is the top.

The Saga of Jenny

A defining characteristic I associate with Michael Kidd’s choreography (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Hello, Dolly!, Guys and Dolls) is that while most dance strives for the appearance of effortlessness, Kidd’s work displays a conspicuous strenuousness. That’s not a criticism so much as an observation citing what makes this number so impressive for me. Kidd puts Julie Andrews through the dance equivalent of a decathlon, but she wins the gold.

Damage Control

When Star! flopped, Fox pulled the film from theaters early, lopped off nearly an hour, and released it to theaters in 1969 under the optimistic, totally nonsensical title Those Were The Happy Times. While I've always liked the original (misleadingly modern) movie poster, I am mad about and positively mesmerized by the sheer, absolute flop-sweat desperation of the re-issue poster. "Be Glad they still make pictures like this!" ...that's like when you complain about the lima beans and your mom responds, "Be glad there's food on your plate at all!" And what's up with that "demented flower girl" artwork? ...by The Sound of Music poster artist Howard Terpning, no less.

BONUS MATERIAL

In 1999, Twiggy (The Boy Friend) and Harry Groener portrayed Gertrude Lawrence & Noel Coward in the Off-Broadway production If Love Were All. Never saw the show but the cast CD is terrific. Sets and costumes were designed by Julie Andrews' first husband, Oscar and Tony Award-winning designer Tony Walton (All That Jazz).

"When you flop in one part, always start in another as soon as possible." 

- Gertrude Lawrence STAR! screenplay

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2021

FUNNY GIRL 1968

I've always been a big fan of movie musicals, but enjoying them often requires a kind of dexterous agility when it comes to the suspension of disbelief. I learned long ago that if I really want to surrender myself to films in which ordinary people in natural surroundings spontaneously burst into fully-orchestrated song and dance, well…it’s just best I not hold too tight a tether on reality. 

In the patently false world of movie musicals, believing in impossible things is, as the White Queen explained to Alice in Through the Looking Glass, not so very difficult to do. What poses a significantly greater challenge is that hybrid genre of musical fantasy which also purports to be rooted in fact: the musical biopic. For years, movies like The Great Waltz (Johan Strauss), Gypsy (Gypsy Rose Lee), and the 1955 Ruth Etting saga Love Me or Leave Me (penned by Funny Girl screenwriter Isobel Lennart), have been tunefully blurring the lines between truth and myth, gleefully playing havoc with audience suspension of disbelief...all just part of Hollywood's long history of playing fast and loose with history.

Funny Girl, William Wyler’s big-screen adaptation of the smash 1964 Broadway musical based on the life of Ziegfeld Follies star Fanny Brice, is one of the more successful stage-to-screen translations of a musical to come out of the '60s. It's colorful, vibrant, funny, with a score of hummable songs marvelously rendered by an engaging, highly photogenic cast. In short, it's a great deal of old-fashioned fun. And yet, in its own way, it's also rather perplexing. 

By this I mean that whether by design or sheer force of star power, somewhere along the line this biopic gently shuttles aside the character of Fanny Brice at some point and becomes a Barbra Streisand infomercial—I'm never quite sure which myth I'm supposed to be following. 

Like a cinematic dissertation on the Wormhole Theory, Funny Girl's fictionalized depiction of the life of Fanny Brice feeds into the real-life Brooklyn-to-Broadway legend of Barbra Streisand the stage star, which in turn funnels into the from-obscurity-to-fame mythologization of Streisand, the movie star. Whew! Streisand's image hews so closely to Funny Girl's representation of Brice, small wonder then that as a kid I used to think Brice's signature song, Second Hand Rose (written in 1921) was actually introduced by Streisand.

"Hello, gorgeous!"
I know, I know. It's trite, cliche, and been done to death. But you knew it was going to crop up somewhere. Better now than leave you in suspense...looking for it...wondering when it was going to spring out at you.

Fanny Brice, née Fania Borach, was one of four children born to New York saloon owners Rose and Charles Borach in 1891. Fanny, who changed her name to Brice in 1908, was a plain-but-talented burlesque comedienne/singer who rose to international stardom as a headliner for Broadway impresario, Florenz Ziegfeld in the early 1900s through the mid-1930s. In 1912, the already once-married Brice found her true love in still-married con man/ex-convict Jules “Nicky” Arnstein, and after six years of cohabitation (Nicky’s divorce was a tad slow in coming), they wed. Their tumultuous union lasted nine years—at least three of which Arnstein spent behind bars for bond theft—producing two children: a boy and a girl. Along the way, Brice got herself a nose job, unsuccessfully tried her hand at dramatic roles, and made a few modest forays into film. A third marriage and greater career triumphs were to come…but that's venturing into Funny Lady territory. So there you have it, the Fanny Brice story. 

Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice

Omar Sharif as Nick Arnstein

Walter Pidgeon as Florenz Ziegfeld

Funny Girl, on the other hand, is about a charismatic, extraordinarily talented, exotically beautiful, ragingly self-confident woman with dragon-lady nails, Cleopatra eye-makeup, and immense, gravity-defying, '60s-type hair. Coincidentally—and only by coincidence—also named Fanny Brice. Set in a picture-postcard, quaintly ethnic New York during a historically imprecise era in America’s recent past (where 1910 showgirls look like moonlighting taxi-dancers from Sweet Charity’s swinging '60s Fandango Ballroom), Funny Girl is the rags-to-riches chronicle of Brice’s rise to fame as star of The Fanny Brice Follies (misidentified in the film as The Ziegfeld Follies, in spite of the fact that the film makes it abundantly clear she calls the shots and is the show's main focus), and her ill-fated marriage to the dashing and atypically ethical gambler, Nick “Too-proud-to-be-Mr. Brice” Arnstein. 

Echoing the themes of countless other “There’s a broken heart for every light on Broadway” musical made since movies first found their voice, Funny Girl ends with Brice reaching the pinnacle of success only to discover (to no one’s surprise but her own) it’s lonely at the top. Our final image: Brice onstage—it’s the only place she can find happiness, y'know— symbolically bathed in a solo spotlight, looking like a million bucks, resplendent in her noble suffering.

Fame - Gotta Get a Rain Check on Pain
Aphoristically speaking, I think Billy Dee Williams said it, if not best, then certainly cheesiest, when he informed the candle-wax-encrusted Diana Ross in Mahogany: "Success is nothing without someone you love to share it with."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Sure, in many ways Funny Girl is corny, derivative, and certainly not the direction movies were headed in the Bonnie and Clyde late-'60s. But given the leaden flatness of similar big-budget musicals of the era (Camelot, Finian's Rainbow), it’s rather amazing Funny Girl came out so well. Doubly so when you realize that it is the only musical ever made by veteran and versatile director, William Wyler (65 at the time and hard of hearing, yet). Seriously, Funny Girl’s opulent sets, sparkling cast of character actors, and seamless blending of music and narrative have the look and feel of classic Vincent Minnelli. In the end, perhaps a little too classic.

For all the pleasure I derive from the film, I'm the first to concede Funny Girl feels altogether too familiar in its telling and is so much the archetypal show-biz biopic that it seems to have been cobbled together from bits and pieces of every backstage Hollywood musical that came before (especially A Star is Born–both versions). Its plot: an equal parts mélange of ugly-duckling fantasy, rags-to-riches fable, soap opera, hagiography, tearjerker, and paean to noble female martyrdom—unfurls as predictably and without incident as a morning train commute, with nary a surprise or unanticipated curve along the track. It's blessed with a sprightly score of songs by Jules Stein and Bob Merrill, and several, by-now-iconic musical setpieces (who today can look at a tugboat and not think of Streisand?...I mean in a good way); but there’s nothing in Funny Girl that I haven’t seen a half dozen times before. Except Barbra Streisand.

Make that the phenomenal Barbra Streisand. A new kind of movie star for a new kind of Hollywood, Streisand’s thoroughly one-of-a-kind, 900-megawatt star quality has the effect of single-handedly wresting Funny Girl from its wholly traditional moorings. Just a decade or so earlier Streisand's unconventional beauty would likely have relegated her to a career of Nancy Walker-type supporting roles in MGM musicals. But in 1968 her look was the new glamour, her voice the new sound, and her talent the singular spoonful of sugar that made this at-times antiquated musical medicine go down.

Streisand's Swan Lake schtick

PERFORMANCES
Personally, I don’t think most musicals benefit from naturalistic acting (i.e., One from the Heart and New York, New York). Musicals operate in a kind of theatrical hyper-reality that requires the actors, when emoting in non-musical scenes, to adopt this thing called “performative excess” - a superficially broad style of acting pitched to a level so as not to render the incidental introduction of fantasy sequences of song and dance ridiculous or incongruous. It's a style most recognizably associated with farces, screwball comedies, and a good many of those grating TV Land sitcoms.

Rumors surrounding Anne Francis (she'll always be Honey West to me) and her displeasure at finding her co-starring role (as Follies showgirl Georgia James) whittled down to nothing, are as plentiful as they are contradictory.

Bullying but delightfully erudite movie critic John Simon once wrote of  Liza Minnelli’s acting:  “[It's]...a desperate display of synthetics forlornly straining for the real thing.” Take away the malice from that statement, and you have exactly what I think is most effective about Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. The vitality of Streisand as a performer—an energy that feels at times as though it might jump right off the screen into your lap—is born of her studied artificiality. She's "on" every single minute! Self-aware and controlling every aspect of her performance down to the bat of an eyelash, with nary a move or gesture left to chance or spontaneity (She played the role on stage for nearly two years). Streisand is a skilled physical comedian with marvelous delivery, but in Funny Girl I think she is rather more an entertainer than actress. Hers is a synthetic method of acting that actually succeeds in conveying the real thing. The result? A stylized performance that feels sublimely attuned to the rhythms required of an intentionally old-fashioned vehicle like Funny Girl .

In a kind of meta reenactment of all those tabloid rumors that had movie first-timer Barbra Streisand squaring off against veteran director William Wyler, Follies neophyte Fanny Brice goes toe-to-toe with boss Florenz Ziegfeld (Walter Pidgeon)

Streisand is one of those stars whose movie career has been built on essentially playing herself in film after film. It may sound like a put-down to say so, but I believe it to be something of a gift to be able to project one's personality dynamically on film. Not everybody can do it...just ask Madonna. 
Streisand can be a wonderful actress and comedienne (personal faves: On a Clear Day You Can See Forever and What's Up, Doc?) but I don't believe anyone goes to a Barbra Streisand movie hoping she’ll so immerse herself in a character that they'll forget it’s her. No, when you’re paying for Streisand, you’re pretty much counting on getting Streisand...and plenty of it. (One exception: In 1981's All Night Long Streisand amusingly played against type in a supporting role as a soft-spoken suburban housewife who dreams of being a country & western star…only she can’t sing. Audiences stayed away in droves.)

12-minutes into Funny Girl, Streisand sings "I'm the Greatest Star" a tongue-in-cheek showstopper that is nevertheless (to borrow a line from the musical, Chicago) "A song of unrelenting determination and unmitigated ego."

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

If I seem to speak of Barbra Streisand to the exclusion of all else in Funny Girl, it’s just that without her, I suspect I would be rather on the fence about the film as a whole. Funny Girl is professional and competent in that way you’d expect from a big-budget studio feature, but I can't help but feel it lacks a certain distinction. The cinematography by Harry Stradling, Sr. (A Streetcar Named Desire, My Fair Lady) can’t be faulted; he turns Streisand into a goddess with each loving (and frequent) close-up. Nor do the musical numbers by Herbert Ross (later Streisand’s director for The Owl and the Pussycat and Funny Lady) come up short, being amiably witty if not particularly dance-filled. The music arrangements, while anachronistically contemporary in sound, show off Ms. Streisand’s million-dollar voice to great effect, and Irene Sharaff’s eye-catching costumes call attention to what a thoroughbred clotheshorse Streisand can be.

The pairing of Sharif and Streisand became an international incident when the Egypt/Israeli War broke out during filming. The married pair (to other partners) consoled one another...if you get my cruder meaning.

Three-time Academy Award-winning director William Wyler, in this his penultimate film in a four-decades-long career, is no stranger to divas (Bette Davis – Jezebel, The Letter, The Little Foxes), camera neophytes (Audrey Hepburn – Roman Holiday), or spectacle (Ben Hur), and as such, acquits himself nicely his first time to bat in this toughest of movie genres. Accounts vary as to whether Wyler molded Streisand’s performance or merely got out of her way, but whatever the circumstances, the result was a critical and popular success that became the second highest-grossing film of 1968, garnering Streisand her first and only Best Actress Oscar win (Wyler was left out of the film's eight nominations).

 Note* Lightning failed to strike twice for "Funny Girl" producer Ray Stark when he enlisted the talents of John Huston—another veteran director not known for musicals—to bring the Broadway hit, "Annie", to the screen in 1982.

Funny Girl's only other nomination in the acting categories was a Best Supporting Actress nod for Kay Medford as Mrs. Brice.   (Folks of my generation will remember her as a regular on "The Dean Martin Show") 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Sometimes I think film is called a lively art because the longer I live, the better certain films begin to look. Funny Girl was released 44 years ago, and since that time, not only has the quality of musicals drastically declined, but the only criteria for stardom today seems to be a pulse and a personality disorder. As I grow older and nostalgia gently overtakes discernment, Funny Girl’s flaws gradually diminish, born of an awareness of Streisand having, in the ensuing years, more than made good on her promise/threat of being "The Greatest Star" (minus scandals, drug busts, or rehab, I might add). 

A healthy suspension of disbelief might be necessary to reconcile Funny Girl's historical and biographical inaccuracies, anachronisms, and outright fabrications; but as a lasting record of the career genesis of one of the last of my generation’s truly great stars, Funny Girl could practically be classified as a documentary.

William Wyler and Streisand on the studio backlot

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012

THE DAY OF THE LOCUST 1975

"It's hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous." Nathanael West The Day of the Locust

America is a country that believes in dreams. We're encouraged to follow our dreams; we're induced to dream big; we're promised that if we believe in our dreams enough, they will most certainly come true.
But, of course, not all dreams come true.
The Day of the Locust is a dark vision of losers on the fringe of Hollywood, a city built on dreams. The question the film posits is: what happens to dreamers when they realize their dreams have betrayed them?
During the mid-70s, America was in the throes of a nostalgia craze that swept up all of pop culture (from fashion to music) in an idealized preoccupation with the 1930s. Perhaps this is why, when John Schlesinger's epic, multi-million dollar adaptation of Nathanael West's sour indictment of the Hollywood dream machine (and, in turn, America's willingness...even need... to be duped by its promises) hit the screens, audiences responded as if they had been kicked in the stomach.
After the soft-focus 30s kitsch of The Great Gatsby (1974), I guess no one was ready for a glamorous, all-star, nostalgic horror film.

Karen Black as Faye Greener

Donald Sutherland as Homer Simpson (yes, I know...)

William Atherton as Tod Hackett

Burgess Meredith as Harry Greener

Geraldine Page as Big Sister

 As a story of the lost and lonely lured to California by the promise of an unattainable dream, The Day of the Locust, written in 1939, is as relevant as ever. Look at the faces of the so-called journalists and paparazzi behind TMZ, and you'll see precisely the kind of predatory bitterness and resentment West wrote about seventy years ago.

The Day of the Locust is one of my all-time favorite films, and I admire it immensely, yet I readily admit that watching it is not entirely an enjoyable experience. I remember back in 1975 when my family and I saw the movie at a theater in San Francisco (on a double-bill with Nashville, no less), the climactic riot scene brought my sister to a state of heaving sobs. And during the cockfight sequence, someone behind me exclaimed, "This is worse than 'The Exorcist'!" It is an amazing, sometimes breathtaking, film, but it's no walk in the park.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Its visual style. It's a nightmare vision of Hollywood that looks like a dream.

The San Bernardino Arms, where many of the film's characters reside

Frank Lloyd Wright's landmark Ennis House, built in 1924  

"We were looking at the pool, and somebody, Jerry Appis, I think, said it needed a dead horse
on the bottom, so Alice got one. Don't you think it looks cute?" 

Interior of the Wright house: Glamorous, cold, empty

PERFORMANCES:

Karen Black has publicly expressed her lack of fondness for this film, but I suspect this has more to do with the well-publicized behind-the-scenes tensions than with her performance. While clearly a controversial choice for the siren that leads men to their destruction, I find it to be one of the finest performances of her career.

As the vain and shallow temptress who thinks her theatrical pretensions are evidence of talent, Black achieves moments of genuine pathos.

She would be comical if she were not so pathetic. The delusional Faye Greener can't distinguish false posturing from genuine feelings.

The Simpsons may have forever dampened whatever poignancy the name Homer Simpson ever held, but Donald Sutherland is such a heartbreaking marvel in this film that, were it a more widely seen movie, his repressed and lumbering Homer would be the one eclipsing the cartoon doofus. In a movie of so many spectacular, full-scale set-pieces, one of the most powerful moments is a simple scene of Sutherland sitting in his sun-baked garden, eyes heavy-lidded with sadness.

He is the picture of loneliness and idle longing, his nervous, tension-filled hands betraying a repressed frustration. And when the camera moves in for a close-up, the light barely catching a tear falling down his cheek...

...the effect is devastating.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY:
I really love how they use faces in this movie. Fellini-esque in the way the people are captured in tableaus of desperation and unidentifiable hunger. It's like getting a celebrity-eye-view of what fans must look like.

Watching, looking, and voyeurism are running motifs in The Day of the Locust. Everyone seems to be looking outward for something they lack within.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS:

Was there ever a sequence as grotesquely surreal as the apocalyptic "The Burning of Los Angeles" riot scene that caps this movie? At this point in the film, things have reached such a tense and tortured pitch (there seem to be two or three different climaxes) that not only are the film's protagonists all keyed up, but so are we. As a Hollywood premiere erupts into a mad mob scene, we in the audience may find ourselves feeling the cathartic release of violence without even knowing it. It is one of the most compellingly visual sequences ever captured on film.

 The banal rendered nightmarish

Horror has a face

The Day of the Locust: burnt offerings and a human sacrifice

Hollywood rarely gets it right when it turns its lens upon itself, but The Day of the Locust is, for me, one of the finest films about Hollywood ever made. As one who loves film for its ability to feed our dreams, I appreciate how The Day of the Locust explores the potentially destructive, ultimately empty allure of the dreams Hollywood packages and sells to us.

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009